Nicotine pouches aren't typically associated with the same health harms as similar products that also contain tobacco, but they have now been linked to receding gums and oral irritation
Vetenskapsnyheter
Today’s computers need safeguards against random energy fluctuations. Thermodynamic computers would put those fluctuations to use. <p>The post <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/thermodynamic-computers-go-with-the-energy-flow-20260715/" target="_blank">Thermodynamic Computers Go With the (Energy) Flow</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org" target="_blank">Quanta Magazine</a></p>
A spate of new studies is revealing the lifelong impact of being marked as exceptional during childhood – and the results suggest we may need to revise how we view giftedness
In naked mole rat colonies, only the queen can breed – and now we have found out how she maintains control
<p>The White House nominated Erica Schwartz, a former deputy surgeon general, to head the nation’s top public health agency</p>
Two capybara pups have been born at Longleat in Wiltshire and are exploring their new home.
In sci-fi, AI can navigate the unknowns and — ideally — keep human travelers safe. But it’s not intelligent enough to do that yet.
<p>Indonesia is building a new capital city in the heart of Borneo to replace sinking Jakarta. As construction transforms one of the world's most biodiverse rainforests, scientists and their indigenous collaborators are racing to record the sounds of the forest—and preserve generations of ecological knowledge before it's lost.</p>
The baby vicuna - the smallest member of the camel family - is settling in well at the Highland site.
<p>Equipping spacecraft with X-ray machines could boost safety for long-duration spaceflights—like a crewed mission to Mars</p>
<p>Beta Pictoris d is more than twice the size of Jupiter, but it is a baby compared to its humongous neighbors</p>
<p>Sotheby’s expects second man on moon’s marker, crucial to Apollo 11 return, to reach astronomical sum</p><p>The felt-tip pen Buzz Aldrin used to fix a broken circuit breaker and escape from the moon in 1969 is up for auction in New York on Wednesday.</p><p>The dented silver plastic Duro Rocket pen – used by the second man on the moon to save Neil Armstrong and himself from being “stuck on the moon for ever” – has a sale price estimated <a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2026/space-exploration-2/apollo-11-16">by Sotheby’s</a> at between $800,000 and $1.2m. The lucky bidder will get the broken piece of circuit breaker, too. Both come from Aldrin’s personal collection.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/15/buzz-aldrin-apollo-astronaut-mission-felt-tip-pen-auction">Continue reading...</a>
Forskare vid Uppsala universitet har hittat en helt ny svampart, som de valt att uppkalla efter kungen. Arten har fått det latinska namnet Semicentenialea rex, som betyder 50-årsjubilerande kung. Den är den första kända representanten för en ny klass av svampar som kommer att heta Semicentenialomycetes.
The latest report on the UK's climate warns cold mountainous areas are also being lost.
Private buyers are increasingly outbidding museums for fossils.
The first juvenile osprey of the season leaves its nest near Wareham.
<p>Solar eclipses are a rare and brief opportunity for scientists to gather data on everything from the physics of the sun to air pressure in the upper atmosphere</p>
<p>Canadian scientists visit remains of polar exploration vessels in ‘golden era for shipwreck investigating’</p><p>Moments after devouring the final glimmers of light, the seafloor offered nothing but darkness and silt. Then the bow appeared.</p><p>More than 1,000ft (305 metres) below the surface of the Labrador Sea, off the coast of Canada, the skeleton of the final ship used by the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/feb/06/how-ernest-shackletons-icy-adventure-was-frozen-in-time-antarctica">famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton</a> appeared in its silty grave.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/15/deep-sea-expedition-builds-digital-twins-shipwrecks-scott-shackleton">Continue reading...</a>
Once again we are told AI may be conscious – I study consciousness, and I have my doubts | Anil Seth
<p>Despite Anthropic’s claims, Claude is no more likely to achieve sentience than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a real hurricane</p><p>For centuries, humans have been fascinated by the prospect of creating artificial beings in our own image. Of developing synthetic minds and artificial bodies that not only think but also feel, and are both intelligent and conscious. For the vast majority of this time, this prospect seemed very distant; a topic for science fiction and philosophy, not for the here and now. But over the past few years, the rapid rise of AI – and especially of language models – has changed everything.</p><p>Last week, the frontier AI firm Anthropic <a href="https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html">published new research on its language model</a>, Claude, in which the researchers claimed to find signs of consciousness emerging within its inner workings. They didn’t claim that Claude is actually conscious in the same way that humans are, but the findings certainly upped the ante on the possibility of consciousness arising in AI.</p><p>Anil Seth is professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and co-director of the Sussex centre for consciousness science. He is the author of <a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/being-you-9780571337729/">Being You</a></p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/15/ai-consciousness-anthropic-claude-dawkins">Continue reading...</a>
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service has issued a warning for central Highlands, southern and eastern Scotland from Wednesday.
More than eight million households have been placed under hosepipe bans - which has raised questions about how effectively water resources are being managed.
<p>Anyone eating <em>Lanmaoa asiatica </em>could have visions for days of tiny people running and jumping around</p><p><em>Lanmaoa asiatica</em> is a bolete mushroom, prized for its delicious taste and hugely popular in Yunnan province, China, where it is found growing in a symbiotic relationship with pine trees. But anyone eating the mushroom needs to be careful because it also gives hallucinations of lots of tiny people about 2cm tall wearing brightly coloured clothes, all jumping, running, climbing and being generally playful, but in a normal, real-world setting.</p><p>The hallucinations are reminiscent of the small people in the hit BBC series <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/feb/09/small-prophets-review-mackenzie-crooks-magical-new-comedy-is-pure-pure-pleasure">Small Prophets</a>, although without their psychic powers. Despite the powerful visions it brings, <em>Lanmaoa</em> is completely unrelated to Psilocybes, or “magic mushrooms”, which give wide-ranging hallucinations for a few hours triggered by the chemical psilocybin.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/15/plantwatch-mushroom-hallucinogen-lanmaoa-asiatica">Continue reading...</a>
På kroppens yta pågår ett ständigt samspel mellan celler, immunsystem och hudens mikrobiota. Vi märker det inte – förrän balansen rubbas. Och då visar det sig att hudens allra...
The current heatwave has been hot, dry and exceptionally sunny with some locations seeing double the number of sunshine hours usually recorded at this point in the month, as Darren Bett explains.
As temperatures rise, scientists are investigating whether a changing Atlantic could bring more volatile weather to the UK