Vetenskapsnyheter

A huge study into the biology of endometriosis has revealed new mechanisms by which it may cause its severe and wide-ranging effects on health , paving the way for improved treatments. The work, which included data from more than a million women, is also the first to identify specific genes linked to endometriosis in people of African ancestry, a group that has historically been under-represented in research on the condition. “We were able to pinpoint around 300 genes that are going to be really exciting for the field to focus on,” says Shefali Setia-Verma at the University of Pennsylvania. Read more A deeper understanding of endometriosis is suggesting new treatments A deeper understanding of endometriosis is suggesting new treatments Endometriosis is a chronic, often debilitating condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows elsewhere in the body, forming lesions. It affects around 10 per cent of women of reproductive age and can cause fatigue, severe pain and fertility problems. It has also been linked with cardiovascular disease, but the biological mechanisms behind this association have remained unclear. To investigate, Setia-Verma and her colleagues took a “multi-omics” approach, combining analyses of genes, proteins, the microbiome and endometriosis symptoms to build a holistic view of the condition. They analysed data from 14 global biobanks, which together hold information about more than a million women. Their initial analyses identified 58 areas of the genome associated with endometriosis, 27 of which were previously unrecognised. A deeper analysis pinpointed 314 genes linked to its development. Importantly, the study uncovered three genetic regions associated with endometriosis that were detected only by analysing the genomes of people with African ancestry. Your science-backed guide to the easy habits that will help you sleep well, stress less, eat smarter and age better. Many of the genes most strongly linked to endomet…

It may one day be possible to reap some of the benefits of sleep without ever closing our eyes. Stimulating specific brain activity in awake mice led to some of the same effects as deep sleep, including a boost in memory. “It should be possible, at least in theory and to some extent, to replicate these results in our species,” says Vladyslav Vyazovskiy at the University of Oxford, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It would be fascinating to explore whether artificially inducing [this activity] during waking [hours] in humans can result in a subjective feeling of being more refreshed and rested afterwards.” Read more It’s your perception of sleep that’s making you feel tired all day It’s your perception of sleep that’s making you feel tired all day Sleep is thought to be an essential way for the brain to carry out most of its maintenance work. This includes synaptic homeostasis, the process whereby the brain declutters the thousands of new neural connections made during the day – storing important ones and weakening or cutting away ones that aren’t as necessary. During non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep – the deep sleep state that makes up around 80 per cent of sleep in adults – the brain’s cortex repeatedly fires signals at the exact same time and then shuts those neurons off, in a pattern called slow-wave sleep activity. “This has been linked to synaptic homeostasis, and may be a key mechanism underlying sleep’s restorative functions,” says Chiara Cirelli at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cirelli and her colleagues wondered if a small part of the cortex could be nudged into entering this deep sleep state while an individual is still awake. Some animals do this naturally, such as dolphins, ducks and fur seals, in which one half of the brain enters NREM sleep while the other remains alert and vigilant for predators. Your science-backed guide to the easy habits that will help you sleep well, stress less, eat smarter and age better. To see if a si…

When a rogue researcher in China revealed in 2018 that he had used CRISPR to create three gene-edited children , his actions were almost universally condemned by biologists around the world. The main objection was not that gene-editing babies is wrong in itself, but that the CRISPR technique used was not safe and had a very high risk of causing harmful mutations. Now, a team in the US has used an improved form of CRISPR, known as base editing, to edit healthy embryos and shown that it can be done without introducing unwanted mutations. So are we now at the point where we could consider allowing the use of the technique? The answer is no, because a major obstacle remains. Read more Baby with rare disease given world-first personal CRISPR gene therapy Baby with rare disease given world-first personal CRISPR gene therapy Our DNA consists of two strands. The first form of CRISPR to be developed uses a protein called Cas9, which hooks up with a piece of guide RNA that helps it find a specific place in the genome. Once there, Cas9 cuts through both strands. When a cell tries to repair the damage, it often makes mistakes, introducing small mutations that can disable genes. So CRISPR-Cas9 is a destructive technique even when it works as intended, and it sometimes goes wrong, with the cut ends of DNA being reattached in the wrong places, causing large mutations and chromosomal abnormalities. But many improved forms of CRISPR have been developed. For instance, CRISPR base editors change a single DNA letter to another , and during the process cut only a single strand of DNA. So base editing can be used to make precise repairs with much less chance of anything going wrong. The technique has already saved lives and a number of trials are under way – for instance, to test it as a treatment for conditions that result in very high cholesterol . The latest on what’s new in science and why it matters each day. But editing embryos is very different from treating diseases. I…

In the winter of 2013-2014, the strong winds of the jet stream shifted north, allowing a mass of warm water dubbed “the blob” to swell across more than 1500 kilometres of the north Pacific Ocean. Floating instruments moored to the seabed off Alaska, Washington and Oregon alerted scientists and the fishing industry to the arrival of this water, which was up to 4°C hotter than normal. Read more How climate change has pushed our oceans to the brink of catastrophe How climate change has pushed our oceans to the brink of catastrophe They were part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), five mooring arrays off the US west and east coasts and Greenland. Announcing $220 million in funding for the programme in 2023, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) said the OOI was needed to monitor “critical organs of the Earth”. But last month the NSF announced that most of these arrays would be removed from the water following funding cuts by the administration of US President Donald Trump. As a planet-warming El Niño climate phase warmed the water further in 2015-2016, sensors running up and down OOI mooring wires revealed the blob was expanding into the deep sea below 250 metres. The mooring data helped show the blob, which repeated in 2019 and may be happening more frequently due to climate change, spurred toxic algal blooms that closed California’s $60 million Dungeness crab fishery for the season. The removal of most OOI moorings will diminish the accuracy of weather forecasting, including precipitation patterns influencing the record drought in the western US. It will also hinder efforts to monitor a possible weakening in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that keeps Europe temperate, as well as the effects of an imminent El Niño. Unmissable news about our planet, delivered straight to your inbox each month. “We’re flying blind, and it will end up costing us more,” says John Abraham at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. While the…

A viral cartoon about open-source software shows a teetering pile of boxes labelled “all modern digital infrastructure” and one tiny box right at the bottom, propping up the whole lot: “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003”. That’s the reality of open source: every website, application and operating system relies on it. Modern society couldn’t function without it, and yet it’s written by volunteers in their spare time. But the growing burden caused by a flood of AI-generated code is causing many to burn out and leave the community altogether, threatening the future of open-source software. Read more 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day AI models are making it easier and easier to generate code to build new features, fix bugs or create entire new projects at the click of a button. But that code is often difficult to integrate into existing projects, confusing or simply garbage. While code submissions get ever easier, human contributors responsible for checking, fixing and approving them are getting swamped. For some workers, the demands have become unbearable. New Scientist arranged an interview with Chad Whitacre, who runs the open-source team at Sentry – a company valued at billions of dollars. Days before the interview, Whitacre cancelled and said he was stepping down from his role. His LinkedIn and Bluesky accounts were shut down, and emails to his account bounced back. He left a blog post explaining that he was stepping away from technology and living a “Neo-Amish” existence. “AI was the last straw,” he wrote. GitHub, the online platform where many open-source projects are hosted and organised, received 1 billion new code submissions in 2025; this year, they are on track for 14 billion, said its chief operating officer Kyle Daigle in April. The latest on what’s new in science and why it matters each day.…

Mice that contain cells with an added rat chromosome have been created by scientists. The next step is to try this with frozen elephant tissue – and if that works, the team will try it with frozen mammoths

A seemingly simple set of rules kicks off a kind of mathematical magic trick, which has kept great minds busy since the 1930s. Columnist Jacob Aron explores the origins of the Collatz conjecture, why it is so addictive to mathematicians and whether AI could help us solve it once and for all

It may feel like the exhaustion of caring for a newborn leaves little room for romance. Now, researchers have found that people really do seem to love their partner less in the first year of parenthood – but there are ways to buffer against this. Prior studies suggest that relationship satisfaction tends to decline in the two years after having a baby, but these rarely account for the state of things before pregnancy. When Agnieszka Sorokowska at the University of Wrocław, Poland, started a family, she wanted to know how her relationship was set to change. “I got pregnant, and then I wrote the grant proposal to look at this,” she says. Read more Should you have children? The true costs and benefits of parenthood Should you have children? The true costs and benefits of parenthood With her colleagues, Sorokowska recruited nearly 300 heterosexual couples without children who had been together for at least two years. Every six months, for at least two years, the participants completed surveys – independently of their partner – in which they ranked on a scale from 0 to 6 how much they loved their partner and how committed they were. The researchers analysed results from 71 of these couples who had a baby during the study and found that pregnancy itself had no impact. But – in line with the prior evidence – the participants reported loving their partners less and being less committed to maintaining the relationship within one year after childbirth. There was no change in this time among the couples who remained without children. Sorokowska – who presented the results at the Love, Actually and in Theory meeting in Edinburgh, UK, last month – plans to continue surveying these couples until their children reach adulthood, to determine whether the effects are long-lasting. But prior research suggests that things gradually improve . “There’s a steep decline in [relationship satisfaction] in the first year, only a small decline from year one to two, and then it seems t…

Over the past 150 years, Earth’s entire surface has been warming, except for one patch of the north Atlantic. Located south-east of Greenland, this area has cooled by as much as 1°C and is known as the “warming hole” or the “cold blob”. Scientists have been split over why this cold blob exists, but the latest evidence backs up the idea that it is caused by a weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the system of currents that transports warmth from the tropics to Europe. Read more Shift in the Gulf Stream could signal ocean current collapse Shift in the Gulf Stream could signal ocean current collapse The AMOC carries warm, salty water from the Gulf of Mexico towards the north Atlantic, where it cools and sinks, flowing back south along the ocean floor. Scientists are concerned that the surge of freshwater from Greenland’s melting ice is making this salty water less dense, so it sinks more slowly, weakening the circulation. Some research suggests the AMOC could cross a tipping point within decades, locking in a future collapse that would freeze Europe and disrupt monsoon rains crucial for agriculture in Africa and Asia. But we only have 22 years of direct observation of AMOC strength, not enough to tease out a clear trend. Climate modelling has suggested that a slowing AMOC is carrying less warm water to the north Atlantic, resulting in the cold blob. However, other modelling has placed most of the blame on the atmosphere. Unmissable news about our planet, delivered straight to your inbox each month. In a 2022 study , Chengfei He at Northeastern University in Boston and his colleagues found that rapid warming of the Arctic has reduced the temperature difference between the pole and the tropics, shifting the jet stream northwards into the cold blob region. The arrival of these strong westerly winds has forced more evaporation and churned up the water, drawing heat out of the ocean. Greater evaporation has also led to more clouds…

Rachel Carson’s look at the dire effects of industrial and agricultural pollution birthed the modern environmental movement when it was first published – and remains as crucial a read today, finds Rowan Hooper

Researchers investigating the origins of Stonehenge’s enigmatic altar stone say it is possible that the 6-tonne rock was carried southwards from Scotland by ice flows – but this hypothesis relies on an unlikely series of events, making it more likely that humans transported it. The 5-metre-long monolith, which is partially buried and overlain by two other stones, has been in its present location, at the centre of Stonehenge’s ring of worked boulders, for around 4500 years. Read more The surprising origins of Britain's Bronze Age immigrants revealed The surprising origins of Britain's Bronze Age immigrants revealed In 2024, researchers including Anthony Clarke at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, determined that the altar stone came from north-east Scotland , based on the chemistry of the rock. “The altar stone is a sandstone – you can imagine grains of sand at the beach that have been squished together,” says Clarke. “We can get an age and the chemical composition for each of those grains and build up a fingerprint, which we can then forensically compare to other rocks throughout the UK and Ireland.” The altar stone’s chemical fingerprint matched outcrops in the Orcadian basin, a geological feature that overlays parts of north-east Scotland. This meant the stone must have been transported 750 kilometres southwards to Stonehenge, in southern England. Each month, Michael Marshall unearths the latest news and ideas about ancient humans, evolution, archaeology and more. Clarke and his colleagues originally thought it was most likely that the stone had been transported by boat. But they also wondered whether it could have been moved by ice during the last glacial period, potentially reducing the distance humans would have had to carry it. In the new study, Clarke and his colleagues used geological analysis and ice flow modelling to reconstruct ancient ice movements. They found that most ice flows from north-east Scotland went to the north, but some did …

A “Godzilla El Niño” is coming, according to some newspaper headlines. The actual story is that there is an 80 per cent chance of an El Niño developing by September. Most models forecast a moderate event – but some suggest it could be very strong, perhaps even a so-called super El Niño . That said, the bigger picture isn’t at all reassuring. However strong this El Niño turns out to be, we can be sure that even more damaging El Niños will occur in the coming decades. Even if future events are no stronger, their effects will be greater in a warmer world. Read more Is a broken jet stream causing extreme weather that lasts longer? Is a broken jet stream causing extreme weather that lasts longer? “Even a standard El Niño event in future will cause larger regional and global impacts,” says Axel Timmermann at Pusan National University in South Korea. What’s even more alarming is that studies by Timmermann and others suggest that El Niños and La Niñas – known as ENSO events – will also become much stronger and start to drive weather in the Atlantic, too, amplifying their impacts. “Our latest computer model simulations predict a shift to more regular and much stronger El Niño-La Niña extremes, as well as an intensification of ENSO impacts on remote regions, in particular Europe,” says Timmermann. Unmissable news about our planet, delivered straight to your inbox each month. The El Niño phenomenon is all about water and winds in the Pacific . During so-called neutral conditions, trade winds blow westwards along the equator, pushing the surface water westwards and piling warm water up along the western Pacific. Cold water wells up next to South America to replace the surface waters being pushed westwards, while warm, moist air rises above the warm waters piled up in the west, producing a lot of rain. But sometimes the trade winds weaken and even reverse, allowing some of that warm water to spill eastwards. The area of rainfall shifts eastwards, too, which can stren…

In a 2021 ad that ran during the Super Bowl – one of the most-watched TV programmes in the US – the actor Matt Damon walks through a hall displaying some of humanity’s greatest achievements and says, with extreme gravitas, “Fortune favours the brave.” The words crypto.com flash on the screen. The not-at-all-subtle implication is that you too can have it all and do something historic; don’t worry about the risk. This was the moment that Ben McKenzie lost it. In his documentary Everyone Is Lying To You For Money , you can see McKenzie on his couch in shock at what he’s seen on TV. His personal journey – from an actor with an economics degree (his breakout hit was the teen drama The O.C. ) to one of the foremost voices speaking out about the grifters of the cryptocurrency world – makes for an entertaining watch, one that he narrates with a light-hearted tone and a streak of charming self-deprecation. Even though I’ve followed the headline news of crypto scandals for years, I was still shocked to find out what some of the industry’s biggest figures thought they could get away with. McKenzie documents the rise of crypto over the past decade, its roots in the loss of trust that followed the 2008 financial crisis and his bafflement at the excitement and increasing appetite for what seems to him to be, plainly, a total scam. He takes aim at the huckster billionaires who run crypto exchanges, interviewing a few of the big names in the game – some of whom received prison sentences for financial crimes, including Alexander Mashinsky, the former CEO of now-defunct cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius, and the industry’s ultimate cautionary tale, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange. He also takes to task Hollywood elites jumping in to hawk cryptocurrencies they don’t understand, and offers empathy, mixed with a little confusion, to ordinary people who lost big on crypto investments yet still seem convinced it’s the money of the fut…

A new retrospective of the artist beloved by mathematicians opens this week. Get up close to the art with our interactive story

A new retrospective of M.C. Escher’s work opens this week. Explore some of his most mind-bending, mathematically inspired works here

Organ Speak Giulia Enders (Illustrated by Jill Enders, and translated by Jamie Bulloch), Hachette (UK); HarperCollins (US) Work, home, politics, TV sagas, juicy celebrity gossip – who doesn’t get caught up in the drama of everyday life? But there may be an equally compelling and fascinating story unfolding every second of every day inside the squishy bodies doing all that living. There, our organs do the quiet yet incredible work of providing the oxygen, energy and resilience we need to experience the joys and navigate the hardships of life. By gaining deeper appreciation of our intricate machinery, honed over millennia of human evolution, we can find fresh inspiration to lead healthier, more meaningful lives, argues Giulia Enders in her new book Organ Speak : What it really means to listen to our bodies. Enders, who is also a medical doctor and a researcher specialising in the digestive system, is best known for her bestselling book, Gut . This is an amusing account of the intestines – her favourite organ – covering nitty-gritty topics like what happens when we fart and what is the best position for defecating. In her latest book, she extols the marvels of five other areas: the lungs, immune system, skin, muscles and, last but not least, the brain. In some ways, the new book is another tour de force. Enders explains complex biology with clarity, great enthusiasm and sometimes a dose of humour, making a strong case for paying more attention to what lies inside the working parts within us. The book shows her fascination with how organs function and what we can do to keep them in good shape. Enders dedicates a chapter to each organ, drawing on the latest scientific research, and weaving in stories from her personal life to map her experiences onto the organ or system. For example, at one point, she describes how her late grandmother’s best friend constantly helped people around him respond to unexpected life events, acting almost like an immune system in hum…

Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com The online encyclopedias are proliferating. While Wikipedia still dominates, there are plenty of others, like the spectacularly nerdy Memory Alpha , which contains all you could ever want to know about Star Trek . Elon Musk has Grokipedia, a partly AI-generated site that purports to correct Wikipedia’s supposed biases, and in doing so is frequently incorrect . Into this fray enters Halupedia . It is truly unique: it is 100 per cent AI-generated and all of the entries are hallucinations. If you request an article, the site will generate it and then store it indefinitely. Nothing on Halupedia is accurate, except by accident. Hence the site has a page for “ The Great Pigeon Census of 1887 “, apparently “an ambitious, if ultimately misguided, undertaking by the Royal Society for Avian Enumeration (RSFE) to meticulously count every gold-crested rock dove within the administrative boundaries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”. Read more How human error became a weapon against large language models How human error became a weapon against large language models Feedback was honestly intrigued by “ The Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Tuesdays “, which aims “to eliminate the occurrence of superfluous Tuesdays, a phenomenon believed by its members to cause significant disruption to the global temporal flow and individual productivity”. We don’t like Tuesdays either: they are our deadline day. Feedback went on the site and hit the “stumble” button, which creates new pages. The site offered us the “ 19nd Century “, described as “a unique period in human history, marked by its distinct chronological anomaly”. It “began precisely on the 15th of March, 1888, following the abrupt cessation of the 18nd Century” and ended as abruptly “on the 3rd of November, 1…

In 1915, Albert Einstein stood before the Prussian Academy of Science and revealed the now-famous equations of his general theory of relativity. Einstein and relativity are synonymous today with genius, but these revelations were initially met with indifference, in part because the maths was too radical for his peers to fully digest. Today, tech firms would have us believe we are on the brink of “superintelligent” artificial intelligence capable of outperforming experts in most domains, producing scientific breakthroughs on a par with Einstein. As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei put it, we will see “ a country of geniuses in a datacenter “. Claims like these are often provided with little evidence, and identifying genius or elevated intelligence is a murky endeavour. But one corner of academia that might be seeing superintelligence come to pass is mathematics. In this week’s cover story , we learn how mathematicians are in a state of wonder and panic about the rapid rise of AI’s mathematical ability. This glimpse of the future doesn’t appear to exclude us, however. AI’s successes also show how integral human mathematicians are to the scientific process. The most impressive AI-fuelled discoveries, such as OpenAI’s recent falsification of an 80-year-old conjecture , are credible only because mathematicians say so. We report how humans are already using AI’s ideas to make progress on other maths conundrums . If this spreads to the other sciences, then it suggests we won’t be following AI geniuses, but will instead look to people who know how to use these tools and insights best. This might not be quite like the superintelligence that AI companies proselytise, but it could be closer to how human genius has always functioned. Without Einstein’s colleagues, like Karl Schwarzschild or Willem de Sitter, who went on to apply relativity to our universe, predicting black holes and an inflationary universe, it wouldn’t have had the outsize impact on our understanding of real…

Physically, Homo sapiens is not that special in the animal world. But the species has discovered ways of finding food and beating the odds of survival in every habitat from jungle to Arctic wasteland. It has also come to obsess Alice Roberts, who started off in medicine, becoming a surgeon and an anatomist. She was captivated by the evolutionary story of the ape that walked and talked, and is now professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her expertise spans anthropology, archaeology and palaeopathology. She also has a huge track record of TV shows, from Digging for Britain and The Lost Scrolls of Pompeii to Witches of Essex , and a growing pile of books. Roberts was editor-in-chief of the latest, Humans: The evolution of a species , which tells the story of human evolution with illustrations and contributions from an international team, including Michael Marshall, who quizzed her about her latest work. Michael Marshall: What’s the big idea in this latest part of your journey into the human past? Alice Roberts: When I was working at the University of Bristol, something happened that was really important to how I think about humans. When I was a young surgeon, teaching anatomy to students, we built a dissection room in the vet school. I was roped in to teach there and remember looking at a lamb’s heart. It was the first time I properly understood the way the heart changes from the fetus to the heart in a baby and an adult. I was thrown into a bigger department where I was forced to see humans as another mammal. And that is what we are. It really changed the way I look at us all. How should we think about our bodies as products of evolution, about our history being written in our skeletons and our organs? There’s biochemistry going on in our cells that goes back to these earliest single-celled creatures living in the ancient oceans. If we look at our arms and legs, they go back about 360 million years, when the first amphi…

When Mark Thomson was 13, he read a book about the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, a particle physics lab whose remit was to interrogate the fabric of reality. The book left him both fascinated by how the universe worked and frustrated by its lack of detail. More than 40 years later, Thomson is CERN’s director general, taking charge just as it shuts down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for upgrades and decides where to place its next multibillion-pound bet. The goal of this gamble is to answer big, lingering questions we still have. In a sense, particle physics hasn’t changed since Thomson was a boy: it is dazzling in its outline, but maddening in the details it cannot yet supply. The field’s crown jewel, the standard model, describes the particles and forces that make up the visible universe with extraordinary precision. And in 2012, the discovery of the Higgs boson seemed to be the masterstroke that completed its picture of reality. But for all its success, the standard model says nothing about dark matter, an invisible substance thought to make up most of the cosmos, and it offers no deeper explanation for the masses of the particles it catalogues. It also cannot account for why the universe contains matter at all after the big bang. Read more We've discovered a door to a hidden part of reality – what's inside? We've discovered a door to a hidden part of reality – what's inside? With the LHC set to undergo major upgrades that will sharpen its search for rare phenomena, Thomson spoke to New Scientist reporter Alex Wilkins at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, about what answers the LHC may still yield, and why its physicists are going all in on a £13 billion collider as its successor. Alex Wilkins: How much has changed since you first read about CERN as a teenager? Mark Thomson: When I first read about CERN, we had three main fundamental forces, plus gravity. We knew about electromagnetism and knew about the particle that conve…

A line that runs through Africa, Europe, Alaska and both poles divides Earth into two halves that reflect the same amount of light – and this newly discovered symmetry may play a critical role in the planet’s climate. It was previously known that the northern and southern hemispheres have almost equal reflectivity, or albedo, but Jianhao Zhang at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US and his colleagues have now uncovered a second line of symmetry along the 27° east and 153° west meridians. Read more Part of the Atlantic is cooling at record speed and nobody knows why Part of the Atlantic is cooling at record speed and nobody knows why The hemispheres separated by this line are nearly equal in three respects: their albedo in clear skies, the reflectivity of clouds and the fractions covered by ice-free oceans. This symmetry has persisted throughout 25 years of satellite observations analysed by Zhang and his colleagues. At first, Zhang thought it must be a coincidence. “What convinced me that the east-west symmetry is not trivial are three features: its uniqueness, its persistence and what we call the triple symmetry feature,” he says. “Finding one division with equal total reflection might be expected. But finding a persistent, unique east-west division that also balances land-ocean distribution, clear-sky reflection and cloudy-sky reflection is much less trivial – especially given how variable and dynamic clouds are.” While the east-west symmetry is centred near 27° east when averaged over the 25-year satellite record, in any individual year, the exact line of symmetry shifts slightly. The team found that these small year-to-year shifts are strongly related to the phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a global climate phenomenon related to fluctuations in sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. Unmissable news about our planet, delivered straight to your inbox each month. “In other words, the symmetry may not sim…

UN researchers are urging people to be less polite to artificial intelligences after a report found that cutting words from prompts could reduce ChatGPT’s energy consumption by up to 25 per cent. Removing “please”, “thank you” and other unnecessary words from AI prompts could save 87 to 98 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, the report from the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) found. That is the equivalent of the annual residential electricity use of up to 760,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa. Read more 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day To reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint, people should write concise prompts, avoid getting sucked into conversation loops and refrain from starting relationships with AI, the researchers said. “We are not saying be rude to your AI. But don’t fall into the interaction trap and don’t go falling in love with it either,” says Kaveh Madani at UNU-INWEH. The large language models behind AI chatbots process text in small units known as tokens. Madani says concise prompts can save energy because they can reduce both the number of tokens the model has to process and the number it generates in response. In some cases, shorter prompts may also simplify the task, further reducing the power required. The latest on what’s new in science and why it matters each day. The UN study – one of the most comprehensive assessments of the environmental costs of AI to date – warns of rapidly increasing energy, land and water use due to the growing adoption of the technology. ChatGPT alone now processes around 2.5 billion queries every day and Google 16 billion, the majority of which have integrated AI summaries. Tech companies disclose little information on their energy use, so the researchers used the available data for their data centres. AI currently accounts for about 20 per cent …

The race to build the first truly useful quantum computer just got more exciting. A quantum computer made from extremely cold atoms has now passed some of the most important milestones towards usefulness, joining a small group of equally able and promising machines. Though there is wide agreement that sufficiently powerful quantum computers would transform our ability to discover new materials and drugs, and break the encryption that underpins the internet , there are many competing ideas about how best to build them. Industry mainstays such as Google and IBM have spent a decade building quantum computers from tiny superconducting circuits, and this approach is currently the front-runner. But an alternate approach that uses electrically neutral ultracold atoms has recently been gaining traction. Ben Bloom at Atom Computing and his colleagues built a so-called neutral-atom quantum computer that can repeatedly catch and correct its own errors , which is a crucial requirement for it to become useful. Read more The day quantum computers break the internet The day quantum computers break the internet “This is a big check mark for what you can do in a neutral-atom system,” he says. “The differences between [experiments] we were doing before were big step changes, but now, it is just about building it better, faster, cheaper.” The researchers focused on error correction , or the quantum computer’s ability to recognise it made a computational error and discard and restart the calculation. Quantum computers are notoriously error-prone and so fixing them is one of the biggest obstacles towards usefulness. Untangle mind-bending physics, maths and the weirdness of reality with our monthly, special-guest-written newsletter. Error correction involves spreading information across several quantum computing bits, which are called qubits. Some of these qubits are then used as an alert system for when an error has occurred, so that it can be fixed. The team at Atom Computi…

The ketogenic diet, best known as a fat-busting fad, holds promise for treating anorexia nervosa. Following the diet – which contains high amounts of fat, moderate amounts of protein and very few carbohydrates – caused nearly 75 per cent of people with the eating disorder to drop below the threshold for diagnosis in a small study. This is thought to be due to the diet restoring malfunctioning energy release in brain cells, which has been linked to anorexia, thereby lowering anxiety and reducing the compulsion to restrict food. Mimicking starvation by restricting carbohydrates in a condition characterised by extreme dieting, and with one of the highest mortality rates of all mental health conditions, sounds risky. But Guido Frank at the University of California, San Diego, argues that when properly supervised, it could remove the compulsive drive to self-starve. “People tell me clinically, it’s like an addiction, [saying] ‘I crave this’,” he says. “Perhaps if you create that state that they crave while giving them enough food, it can be beneficial.” Read more Why the keto diet could be a revolutionary way to treat mental illness Why the keto diet could be a revolutionary way to treat mental illness Frank and his team asked 22 women with anorexia, whose body mass index (BMI) had risen enough to sit in the healthy to slightly underweight range, to follow a ketogenic diet for 14 weeks, supervised by a dietician, psychiatrist and a peer support counsellor who had experienced anorexia. Their weight, mood and anorexia symptoms were monitored weekly, using questionnaires to track any changes in body image, depression, food-related anxiety and fear of weight gain. The 18 women who stuck to the diet for the full 14 weeks showed a significant improvement in anorexia symptoms and scores of depression, which commonly occurs alongside anorexia. Thirteen of them (72 per cent) even improved enough to drop below the threshold for clinical diagnosis for both anorexia and depr…

Some of the microbes lingering on the 5300-year-old remains of “Ötzi the Iceman” may still be metabolically active, despite being kept in icy conservation conditions. Ötzi’s mummified body was discovered in 1991 thawing out of an Alpine glacier close to the border of Austria and Italy. He is estimated to have lived at some point between 3350 and 3120 BC, and in the 35 years since he was found, studies of his remains have revealed a treasure trove of information, including that he was probably dark-skinned and balding , had numerous tattoos and had a wound in his shoulder from an arrow , suggesting he was murdered . Read more Ancient DNA may rewrite the story of Iceland's earliest settlers Ancient DNA may rewrite the story of Iceland's earliest settlers Ötzi is now kept at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, in conditions designed to mimic some of those inside the glacier where he was found: a temperature of -6°C (21°F) and a relative humidity of 99 per cent. Frank Maixner at Eurac Research’s Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano and his colleagues have analysed the bacteria and fungi found in skin swabs, tissue fragments and internal thawed water samples from the mummified remains taken in 1992, 2010 and 2019 and compared them with soil and ice samples collected from the discovery site in the 1990s. On Ötzi, they found both ancient and modern-day microbes, some of which may be metabolically active. “We can really distinguish between the Iceman’s endogenous gut bacteria and microbes that joined from the environment as soon as he died,” says Maixner. Each month, Michael Marshall unearths the latest news and ideas about ancient humans, evolution, archaeology and more. The team’s metagenomic analysis of internal tissues revealed specialist bacteria that thrive without oxygen inside the mammalian gut, including species of Treponema and Kineothrix . Based on the level of damage to the DNA of these bacteria, which accumulates over time, the…