<p>A 23-year-old student overturned an ancient conjecture about one of math’s simplest operations</p>
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Two “superpuff” planets orbiting a sunlike star over 1,000 light-years from Earth are as big as Jupiter and as dense as cotton candy.
Playing a mental speed-training game seems to help the brain clear a protein linked to Alzheimer’s disease in men, but may work in women through different mechanisms
An experimental immunotherapy has beaten aggressive brain tumours in a handful of children, and a personalised version is now being tested on more patients
<p>The psychotherapist Amy Morin says uttering a ‘short, positive sentence’ can offer the cognitive reset we need. The idea makes me cringe – but then I can barely cope with returning defective trousers</p><p>Are you dreading a high-stakes meeting, a challenging professional task or an awkward conversation? I’m not, because I’m a craven coward who has dodged that kind of unpleasantness for years. If only I had a “power phrase” to activate, maybe things would have been different.</p><p>That is the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/amy-morin-mental-strength-two-minute-reset-power-phrase-2026-7">psychotherapist Amy Morin’s advice</a> for dealing with sticky situations. The author of The Mental Strength Playbook, Morin explained in Business Insider that a “short, positive sentence you say to yourself in the moment” is an effective two-minute cognitive reset. She used hers, she says, while answering challenging questions to land her book deal: “I activated my power phrase and told myself, <em>I’m a strong, straightforward communicator.</em>”</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/13/can-a-power-phrase-turn-a-spineless-worm-like-me-into-a-go-getter-i-doubt-it-but-its-worth-a-shot">Continue reading...</a>
Floodplain meadows are one of the rarest habitats in England, says the wildlife trust.
Cumbria is one of the natterjack toad's last strongholds in Britain, a conservationist says.
A month on from the firm's stock market debut, the reality of how SpaceX currently makes money has seemed to come into clearer focus.
<p>Alignment will be one of the prettiest naked-eye sights of the month, if the sky is clear</p><p>Two celestial beauties line up on Friday when the young crescent moon meets brilliant Venus in the evening twilight. It will be one of the prettiest naked-eye sights of the month, so long, of course, as the clouds behave.</p><p>The chart shows the view looking west from London at 10pm BST. By that time the sun will have set but the sky will still be bright with summer twilight.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/13/young-crescent-moon-to-meet-venus-in-evening-twilight">Continue reading...</a>
Genom att frysa ner egna friska blodstamceller i 20-årsåldern, tina upp dem och göra en stamcellstransplantation i 40–50-årsåldern skulle det vara möjligt att föryngra sitt...
It was the first time firefighting planes had been sent up from the normally drier and hotter south of the country to tackle fires in the Paris region.
<p>On a three-day fungi workshop in Australia’s largest cool temperate rainforest, <strong>Alexis Buxton-Collins</strong> unearths an unexpected appreciation for the third kingdom of life</p><p>Revered as one of Australia’s last true wilderness areas, Takayna/Tarkine is a place of legends. Freshwater crayfish that can reach almost a metre in length lurk in the shade of 2,000-year-old Huon pines, and every few years a rumour emerges that thylacines still prowl the dense Gondwanan rainforest of north-west Tasmania.</p><p>For 65m years, this landscape has sheltered all manner of astonishing creatures. But some of the most fascinating life forms found here are even older. Before animals walked the Earth or trees began converting carbon dioxide into oxygen, fungi helped to create the conditions necessary for complex life on our planet. “People often say that fungi grow in the forest,” Dr Alison Pouliot, a mycologist, tells me as we inhale cool air perfumed with the gentle spice of sassafras. “But there wouldn’t be a forest without fungi. Fungi are the ecosystem engineers that created the foundation for the forest.”</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/ng-interactive/2026/jul/13/mushroom-trip-a-mycologists-tour-of-the-tarkine">Continue reading...</a>
New climate evidence adds context to these long voyages.
<p>Alpha-gal syndrome is increasing across the U.S., driven by lone star ticks</p>
<p>The sheer amount of insects that free-range cats consume might surprise you</p>
<p>Two drugs are being trialled in the Ituri region in a programme set up just six weeks after the outbreak was declared, with hopes it will reduce mortality rates</p><p>There is no approved drug to help the medical teams scrabbling to save lives in the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – but there are hopes that could change within months as the first patients are enrolled in a treatment trial.</p><p>It is a record pace to set up and start this kind of research, scientists said, with patients enrolled just six weeks after the <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-disease-in-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-and-uganda-determined-a-public-health-emergency-of-international-concern">outbreak being declared a public health emergency</a> of international concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 17 May.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jul/12/record-breaking-ebola-treatment-trial-drc">Continue reading...</a>
Alderney is set to represent the Bailiwick of Guernsey in the national Royal Horticultural Society awards.
Children from a school near a popular beauty spot test local water quality over pollution concerns.
The two-year-old female has moved from Longleat to Woburn and is settling in well, her keepers say.
<p>I love busting out a French subjunctive in pursuit of better restaurant service, so it’s a joy to discover there’s a neuroscientific upside to being multilingual</p><p>It’s hard to pick a favourite PG Wodehouse line, but the one I’m perhaps most fond of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/332816-into-the-face-of-the-young-man-who-sat-on">is this</a>: “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”</p><p>It’s funny, but it also succinctly captures something that I have long felt about language acquisition, which is that in order to truly embrace learning another tongue, you have to be prepared to look foolish and vulnerable. (Why that can be so difficult for the English – a monoglot minority on a largely bilingual planet – is another article entirely.) More people will perhaps be prepared to endure that humbling process now, as new research has found that learning another language can <a href="https://www.fens.org/news-activities/news/speaking-another-language-could-slow-ageing-in-the-brain">slow ageing in the brain by up to 13 years</a>. Multilingualism, it is thought, promotes brain connectivity and slows its decline with age.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/12/learn-another-language-french-restaurant-service-multilingual">Continue reading...</a>
A 67 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex will go on sale in New York with a pre-sale value of $30m.
<p>A brown huntsman<em> </em>is the quickest of more than 250 species analysed by scientists in the UK and Germany</p><p>If arachnophobes were not frightened enough by the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/oct/24/australia-giant-spider-mouse-carry-horrifying-impressive">horrific ability of Australia’s huntsman spiders to drag dead mice up the sides of fridges</a>, they now have another reason.</p><p>They might be the fastest spiders on the planet.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/09/fastest-spider-on-the-planet-brown-huntsman">Continue reading...</a>
<p>An ancient sample shows calcite threading through the material’s cracks and pores, with possible lessons for making modern concrete last longer</p>
Endangered rodents, birds and butterflies will be among the species benefitting from the investment.
<p>New Trump administration rules would undermine longstanding research practices. It’s death by a thousand cuts</p><p>A politician who aims to gradually privatize and ultimately destroy an institution funded by tax dollars – say, a public school system or public transportation network – may choose to do so by strategically disinvesting resources from that institution until it becomes barely functional, leading users to look elsewhere to meet their needs. Eventually, the user-base of the public system gets so low or frustrated that it seems reasonable to scrap the thing entirely, or re-direct public funds to private companies as contractors to provide the needed “service”. We’ve seen this strategy play out many times in states and city councils across America.</p><p>It appears that the endgame of the Trump administration’s attacks on science and the research funding ecosystem is similar: grant freezes and administrative disarray at federal funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), new layers of project review by political appointees hunting for forbidden keywords such as “disparity” and “marginalized”, and proposed new restrictions to make international collaboration difficult or impossible all point towards a world where it’s just too onerous to do federally-funded scientific research. Is the goal to make scientists simply give up on the endeavor?</p><p>Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/health">Health</a> at Columbia University</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/11/trump-administration-scientists-rules">Continue reading...</a>