Vetenskapsnyheter

To chart how our brains change over the course of our lives, neuroscientists have focused largely on beginnings and endings: the rapid development and pruning of neural connections in childhood and adolescence, and the degeneration associated with old age. “We kind of skipped over middle age,” says Sebastian Dohm-Hansen , a bioinformatician at University College Cork in Ireland. There are good reasons for that, not least that changes in brain structure and function are easier to spot with neuroimaging when they are at their most extreme. In the case of cognitive decline and dementia, “a lot of what we care about presents most dramatically after the age of 60”, says Dohm-Hansen. But over the past few years, researchers have started to look more closely at the middle-aged brain, identifying a series of subtle but significant changes between the ages of 40 and 65 that mark it out as a vital time to identify problems that won’t manifest until later in life. Read more Chronic inflammation messes with your mind. Here's how to calm it Chronic inflammation messes with your mind. Here's how to calm it “Think of midlife as the top of an inverted U-curve,” says Ahmad Hariri , a professor of neuroscience at Duke University in North Carolina. You spend the earlier decades on the upward slope, developing and refining your brain. You’ll likely spend decades on the downward slope, slowly losing those gains. “Targeting midlife is like extending that level section at the top of the curve, to delay the downward trajectory.” Among the most important of these midlife changes, according to a 2024 review by Dohm-Hansen and his colleagues, are changes in connectivity – how well neurons send signals over long distances and how the brain organises its processing across regions. This connectivity peaks in middle age, then rapidly declines. Your science-backed guide to the easy habits that will help you sleep well, stress less, eat smarter and age better. The extent of the decline c…

Our understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum goes back to Isaac Newton, but astronomers are still finding new ways to employ it. Astrophysicist Emma Chapman explores how much these invisible waves can reveal to us about the cosmos – and whether they might show us that we’re not alone

This is a month to look out for some powerful new books, with authors taking on challenges of all sorts and imagining whole new worlds. There are fresh ways to think about a cancer diagnosis, a book tackling the real inner world of hormones, in which we are all hormonal all the time, plus a major re-envisioning of the natural world where we abandon the shallows of competition for the depth and intricacies of connection and togetherness. Welcome to the symbiocene. It’s quite hard going to get an up-to-date grip on human evolution, even for the best-briefed adult, so a book with sophisticated text and excellent illustrations and diagrams can only be a good thing. Especially if it is curated and edited by Alice Roberts, biological anthropologist, palaeopathologist, broadcaster – and professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham, UK. She worked with a generous-sized international team of experts in many fields of human evolution, including archaeology, palaeontology, anthropology and cognitive science. Each chapter is devoted to the evolution of a part of the body, including hands, lungs and the digestive system, building a complex picture of our origins and nature. There are so many questions to address: when did we invent clothes? Why are our babies altricial (underdeveloped and highly dependent at birth)? What happened to the other modern humans? Are we the only animals to have become quite so self-aware? Just the kind of book to take on a very long trip. For Saira Hameed, we are all hormonal, all of the time – it’s not colloquial shorthand for feeling tired, moody, puffy or all three. But then, as a consultant endocrinologist, she knows that the tiny hypothalamus (“an implausible leader of the body’s hormones”, as she calls it) controls the myriad processes that are all about everyday life and that we barely notice when they work: appetite, body weight, thirst, stress, sleep, growth, metabolism, puberty, reproduction and sex drive. T…

From dementia to heart attacks, hearing loss has been linked to a wide range of effects across the body, and the condition is on the rise. Fortunately, we're learning how best to safeguard this crucial sense and how we might be able to reverse the damage

Deep below our feet, manganese may exist in a form we have never seen before, and this underground source of the metal could have played a role in the story of how Earth got its oxygen. Until about 2 billion years ago, Earth’s atmosphere barely contained any oxygen. Then came the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) when oxygen produced by photosynthesising microbes started to accumulate, spurring development of more diverse forms of life and changing the planet. Read more Record-breaking drill core reaches 1.2 kilometres into Earth's mantle Record-breaking drill core reaches 1.2 kilometres into Earth's mantle Manganese is thought to have been a crucial component in an early version of photosynthesis, before the evolution of the oxygen-producing pathway that is widespread today. In Earth’s crust, manganese is commonly found in oxygen-containing ores, which started to accumulate at around the same time as the GOE. According to Jingming Shi at Jiangsu Normal University in China, some of this ore could have come from a hitherto unknown manganese compound deep underground, hiding in Earth’s mantle. Many manganese oxides are known to exist at standard pressure, but Shi and his colleagues set out to explore which of them may be stable at extreme pressures and temperatures deep inside our planet. They used a computer simulation to explore how thousands of different arrangements of manganese and oxygen atoms would behave at pressures up to 1.5 million times the atmospheric pressure, comparable to conditions about 2900 kilometres under Earth’s surface. The latest on what’s new in science and why it matters each day. This led them to several new compounds, including one that has four manganese atoms for every oxygen atom, which is unusually rich in the metal. “We did not necessarily expect such a manganese-rich oxide to be stable over such a wide pressure range. That was the most interesting and unexpected finding,” says Shi. While the team doesn’t have direct evidence t…

Togetherness Rowan Hooper ( Fern Press , UK, out 4th June; Knopf , US, out 18th August) The best books are those that give you a new perspective, but Togetherness by my colleague Rowan Hooper has given me something more than that – not just a new view, but a new way of seeing. In essence a book about symbiosis, Togetherness zooms from the inner workings of our cells all the way out to how our planet functions as a whole and back in again, revealing how biological cooperation underpins all life – and why Western science has largely failed to notice this for centuries. Symbiosis is the kind of concept you learn at school, often with a too-neat-to-be-true definition and a few quirky illustrative examples – coral, say, or lichen. Both feature in Togetherness (plus plenty of extraordinary cases you won’t be familiar with), but Rowan makes it abundantly clear that symbiosis isn’t a freak occurrence confined to a few classic cases: it’s a rule of nature, occurring time and time again and everywhere you care to look. How a radical new view of life could reveal its origin – and aliens We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun How a radical new view of life could reveal its origin – and aliens We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun Having demonstrated this, he then makes his passionate argument for how this revelation requires us to re-examine everything we know about the natural world. He traces our understanding of evolution through history, and how Charles Darwin’s dazzling fundamental insights on competition and survival have an overlooked counterpart in the tendency of unrelated living things to come together. Rowan – as big a fan of Darwin as I’ve ever met – treads the line car…

People with advanced pancreatic cancer taking an experimental daily pill lived nearly twice as long as those receiving chemotherapy infusions

Turmeric is heralded for its anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties, but columnist Alice Klein finds that the evidence for this is shaky. Taking high doses of its curcumin extract in supplement form can be risky

Mathematicians are stunned at the progress AI is making in solving advanced problems, leaving some questioning whether there will still be room for humans

Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence: could a computer convince a human it was human? We have begun conducting the same test on ourselves, writes Max Moser

Almost 50 more genes have been flagged as being linked to Alzheimer’s, along with changes in activity in crucial cells that disappear as dementia progresses

Two companies are aiming to preserve Arctic ice by pumping water onto the sheet and letting it freeze, but only one of the trials found that this delayed melting in the summer

There is plenty of intriguing sci-fi on offer this month, whether it’s solar-powered cities from Adrian Tchaikovsky or a strange future from M. John Harrison

Particles of light cannot be divided into smaller particles, but if you try to snip off the end of one, instead of shortening it multiplies

According to a mathematical model of how people weigh up different outcomes, the optimal strategy is to be ambitious, but not overly so

Quantum Backrooms is a horror game in which the player explores eerie rooms. The twist is that the rooms have been generated by a quantum computer

We're increasingly prioritising our own needs over those of the wider community, which may be causing us to love our partners less intensely

Bacteria created using mirror images of natural biomolecules would pose a grave threat to life on Earth, some researchers warn, but a new study suggests they would struggle to survive in the wild

A cancer-killing virus has stopped pancreatic tumours from growing and spreading in three people in an initial safety trial, raising hopes that it may help to beat the deadly condition

Even if you’ve never bought any cryptocurrency, like columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, your money may be affected by Bitcoin’s fate – which is uncertain, as quantum computing advances are threatening to make the encryption protecting it useless

Dive into the opening of The Selfish Gene's first chapter 'Why are people?', the New Scientist Book Club’s read for June to mark 50 years since the popular science classic was first published

Until recently, the Pamir mountains in central Asia have bucked the global melting trend, but in 2025, the region’s glaciers experienced a massive loss of ice due to extreme heat

After an AI from OpenAI found a trick to solve an 80-year-old conjecture from Paul Erdős, mathematicians have borrowed the same technique to solve another important problem

AI start-ups with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding are hiring mathematicians and building AI systems that they hope will not only solve mathematics, but also build more intelligent AI

The cost of CAR T-cell therapy means that the highly effective cancer treatment is unavailable in many parts of the world. But a new way of making these cells could dramatically drive down the cost