Tabla de contenidos para 24 January 2026 en New Scientist

Our demand for water (see main story) has many knock-on effects, including the sinking of important river deltas, which is putting millions of people at risk of flooding. Manoochehr Shirzaei at Virginia Tech and his colleagues attempted to determine the rate at which 40 river deltas around the world are sinking, including the Mekong, Mississippi, Amazon, Zambezi, Yangtze and Nile. The researchers used data from 2014 to 2023 obtained by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 1 satellite radar, which can measure changes in the distance between the satellite and the ground to an accuracy within 0.5 millimetres. In all 40 deltas, more than a third of each area is sinking, while in 38 of them, more than half of the area is (Nature, doi.org/qnmm). They also looked at data on…

ASTRONOMERS have caught a massive star exploding just moments after the universe emerged from the cosmic dark ages, illuminating how the first stars were born and died. When stars run out of fuel and explode, they produce a burst of powerful light called a supernova. Supernovae can look extremely bright in our local universe, but the light from a star exploding in the early universe can take billions of years to reach Earth, by which time it has dimmed. Because of this, astronomers can typically only see very distant supernovae in special cases, such as type Ic supernovae, which are stellar cores that have lost their outer gas and produce an exceptionally bright burst of gamma rays. Type II supernovae, which are the most common stellar explosions we see in…

Book Horses Ludovic Orlando (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan) Princeton University Press IT IS in the epilogue of his latest book that equine geneticist Ludovic Orlando delivers one of his biggest take-home messages: “[T]he horse,” he writes, “remains what it has been for almost our entire history, a vector for bringing people together.” It is both a beautiful statement and a major theme in Horses: A 4000-year genetic journey across the world. In this translation from the French, we see how human civilisation evolved alongside the domesticated horse. With Orlando, we follow a scientific journey that explains the mysteries of this impressive, influential animal across its 4200 years beside humans. But the statement in reverse – as Orlando’s text reveals – is true as well: humans, across history, have also…

I AM a dyed-in-the-wool Peter F. Hamilton fan, so I was really looking forward to his new book, A Hole in the Sky, especially as I always love an ark ship story. This ship is hundreds of years into its voyage, and its inhabitants have regressed to something like medieval peasantry, living in villages beneath the high-tech towers their ancestors inhabited. We learn about the issues they have faced – a problem with the first planet they were meant to land on, then a mutiny on board – which have left them in dire straits. At the age of 65, every individual must be recycled for the good of the ship. I loved every single thing about this set-up. All this is told from the first person perspective of Hazel,…

THE first time I took a photograph of the moon through my telescope was almost a decade ago. It was a very amateur set-up. I held up my phone camera to the eyepiece and after capturing a dozen fuzzy images, my shaky hands managed to stay steady for long enough that I got a clear picture of the moon’s surface. I was so proud of the photo that I posted it online. I hadn’t realised it back then, but I was photographing the moon during a very specific 4-to-6-hour window that comes around each month. It wasn’t until someone replied to my post that I realised, by sheer chance, I had captured two fleeting features on the lunar surface known as the lunar X and V. These marks on the…

This Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) is enjoying her new-found freedom after being released into Bukit Baka Bukit Raya National Park in Indonesia. Called Koras, she is one of three orangutans to have recently been returned to the wild, after a stay at a rescue and rehabilitation centre, where she was treated for a skin infection. Koras was brought there after being saved from the illegal wildlife trade.…

THE largest-ever analysis of Tyrannosaurus rex fossils suggests that the fierce Cretaceous predator was a late bloomer, taking 35 to 40 years to reach maturity. The findings further the debate about whether there were several T. rex species and whether smaller specimens, once thought to be juveniles, are in fact a more diminutive species called Nanotyrannus. Based on studies done two decades ago, it had been thought that T. rex reached its maximum weight of 8 tonnes in around two decades and that the animals probably only lived until they were 30 years old. “The last big T. rex growth studies were done in the early 2000s, based on, at most, seven specimens,” says Holly Ballard at Oklahoma State University. This time, Ballard and her team were able to sample…

Black holes come in different sizes (see main story) and can form in different ways. One idea is that a particularly massive star could collapse in on itself to form a black hole, rather than exploding in a supernova, and we might now have seen that process in action. In 2024, Kishalay De at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues observed an unusually bright star called M31-2014-DS1 in the nearby galaxy Andromeda that was around 20 times as massive as our sun. The star appeared to grow brighter in 2014, before becoming dramatically dimmer between 2017 and 2020. Now, De and his team have observed this star with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, finding a faint, red object where the star once…

A TRIP to Pompeii’s public baths meant taking a dip in water contaminated with sweat and urine – until the Romans took over and sanitation improved. For a large chunk of its history, Pompeii was occupied by the Samnite people. It only became a Roman colony after 80 BC, about 160 years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. “Contamination must have taken place from sweat, oily sebum produced by the skin and even urine” Like the Romans, the Samnites seem to have been keen on bathing. They built at least two public baths – now known as the Stabian Baths and the Republican Baths – sometime after 130 BC. Gül Sürmelihindi at the University of Mainz in Germany and her colleagues have now analysed mineral deposits in the bathhouses to…

RIGHT now, I’m glued to my phone. Like most people in the US, I get my news from various apps – social posts, podcasts, newsletters – and when things are blowing up (literally) I can’t look away. People in Minneapolis are posting video updates from protests; experts are publishing essays about international law and the US attack on Venezuela. I have to consume them all! The weirdest part, though, is that the more I watch and read what other people are saying, the lonelier I feel. This is hardly a new or unique experience. Sociologists have been talking about it for nearly 80 years. In 1950, scholars David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney published a book called The Lonely Crowd, in which they argued that the rise of consumerism…

Book The Score C. Thi Nguyen Allen Lane THIS time last year, I wrote an article for New Scientist about the perfect way to cook the classic pasta dish cacio e pepe, according to physicists. The meal’s smooth, glossy emulsion of black pepper, pecorino cheese and water is hard to make lump-free. Ivan Di Terlizzi at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany and his colleagues cooked cacio e pepe hundreds of times until they produced an exacting and foolproof method. The story proved popular with readers. When I caught up with one of the scientists involved recently and asked him why, he told me it may have been because the research seemed to find order in a ”world that looks like a mess if…

Editor’s pick Why sci-fi tends to put humans front and centre 27 December 2025, p 16 From Joel Garreau, Broad Run, Virginia, US I’m a fanboy of Annalee Newitz and hesitate to question anything they say about science fiction. But one aspect of their recent column has me scratching my head. Can they really be mystified by why humans are far more interested in anything a member of their species does in space than anything a robot does? I don’t think people are fascinated by going into space themselves because of sci-fi stories. It’s the other way around: sci-fi stories are focused on humans (and humanoids) because they were created by master storytellers – like Newitz. They know what readers want. The US paid a significant percentage of its federal…

Even stranger things In common, it seems, with a substantial fraction of the human species, Feedback spent part of our holiday watching the final episodes of Stranger Things. We laughed, we cried, we wondered if it would have even more endings than The Return of the King (it did). As is almost inevitable these days, a group of fans vocally disliked the finale, and went so far as to create a conspiracy theory about it. According to “Conformity Gate” (don’t blame us, we didn’t name it), the finale wasn’t the real finale – despite lasting more than 2 hours, costing an enormous amount of money and being shown in cinemas. No, a super-secret final episode was going to air in January, which would reveal the true ending. The evidence for…

IF YOU thought body fat was just a passive storage depot for calories, think again. Research suggests it plays an important role in our overall health, with two studies shedding light on its complexity. Fat exists in several forms. For instance, there’s white fat, which stores energy and releases hormones that influence metabolism; brown fat, which generates heat; and beige fat, which sits somewhere in between, switching on heat production under certain conditions. Even within these categories, location matters: fat under the skin is generally less harmful, while fat deep inside the abdomen – known as visceral fat – is strongly linked to inflammation and heart disease. The latest research suggests fat actively helps regulate blood pressure and coordinate immune responses at key locations. In one of the new studies,…

Your diet can affect your longevity (see main story), and a study in China has revealed that most centenarians there eat meat, which may be particularly helpful for those who are underweight. To better understand the link between diet and longevity, Kaiyue Wang at Fudan University in Shanghai and her colleagues gathered data from a centralised Chinese health database on people older than 65. They investigated the database’s 5203 participants, who were at least 80 years old in 1998 and free of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. Of these, about 80 per cent said they were meat-eaters, while the others ate plant-based diets. Of the vegetarians who had a body mass index below 18.5 (defined as being underweight) in 1998, 24 per cent reached 100, compared with nearly 30 per…

GREENLAND sharks are thought to live between 250 and 500 years – but their hearts show signs of severe age-related disease even when the sharks are just 150 years old. Some parts of the shark’s body, such as the eyes, seem impervious to ageing and to cancer, which might have suggested the marine predator’s heart is also protected from age-related decline. But an analysis has found that Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) actually show signs of serious heart disease – and yet there is no apparent loss of function or reduction in the species’ lifespan (bioRxiv, doi.org/qm2m). Alessandro Cellerino at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, a member of the research team, says he found the results of the analysis of six Greenland sharks – four females and two males, all over 3…

A YOUNG yellow baboon (main image) looks out over the Udzungwa Mountains National Park in Tanzania. The Udzungwa mountains are covered by very rich rainforests, but their remoteness means the area was relatively unexplored by biologists until recently. There are six species of primate living in the park, and for two – the Udzungwa red colobus and the Sanje crested mangabey – the park is their last refuge. Another animal found here, the kipunji monkey, was only recognised as a new species in 2003 – the first new monkey species discovered in Africa since the 1980s. “To me, it was kind of magic,” says photographer Frédéric Noy, who has taken a series of images of the region. It’s not so surprising that we are still discovering new species of fish…

Bethan Ackerley Subeditor London Nobody makes blockbusters like James Cameron. Avatar: Fire and Ash, his third film set on the verdant moon Pandora, is bombastic and beautiful. And from interspecies war to family feuds, there’s also an awful lot going on. Some 15 years after ex-Marine Jake Sully was adopted by the Indigenous Na’vi, after helping to drive back the human military and fusing with a Na’vi body, he has made a life on Pandora with his partner Neytiri and their children. But now they are grieving the loss of their eldest son, Neteyam. And their old enemy, Colonel Quaritch, has joined forces with a powerful volcano-dwelling clan of Na’vi, led by Varang (pictured above). Shakespeare this isn’t (the dialogue is crass, to put it politely), but there is no…