A new retrospective of M.C. Escher’s work opens this week. Explore some of his most mind-bending, mathematically inspired works here
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A new retrospective of the artist beloved by mathematicians opens this week. Get up close to the art with our interactive story
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…
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…
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…
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…
Campaigners have said nesting swifts may have been displaced after part of a building was demolished in Dorking, after building work scheduled for autumn started during migration season.
Swift groups said a section of wall containing crevices used by the birds was removed at the site in Station Approach in May.
Photographer Amy Brewer said she saw birds attempting to return to nests which swifts use year after year, while Dorking Swift Conservation said an established colony could be lost.
Clarion Housing Group said ecological checks were carried out before demolition began and further checks undertaken throughout the works. Mole Valley District Council has issued a temporary stop notice.
Brewer, who has been documenting swifts, said she had previously seen birds entering gaps in the structure and believed several nests were present.
"I went back the day after and got footage of them flying around, trying to get in, but the wall had gone," she said.
"It was heartbreaking. You could tell they were trying to find where their nests were."
She said there was usually one pair to each nest and there were probably multiple nests at the site.
Julia Hemsley, a founder of Dorking Swifts Conservation, said the site had been used as a nesting colony for many years.
"They committed a wildlife crime. They were fully aware of nests there," she said.
She said swifts had been arriving in the UK looking for their nests and she had seen more than 30 swifts flying above the building site.
Hemsley warned it was not uncommon for the birds not to breed again after losing their nests.
"Swifts go back to nests year after year, they are very loyal to them," she said.
She said campaigners wanted the building developer to be held accountable under wildlife laws.
She also called on residents to put up swift boxes and use calls to attract the birds to new nesting sites.
Surrey Police said it had received reports and was reviewing the incident, including obtaining any relevant f…
<p><img width="1024" height="576" src="https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/grottlejon-skalle-1024x576.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Lejonhuvud med kraftiga huggtänder." decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" srcset="https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/grottlejon-skalle-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/grottlejon-skalle-300x169.jpg 300w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/grottlejon-skalle-768x432.jpg 768w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/grottlejon-skalle-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/grottlejon-skalle-850x478.jpg 850w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/grottlejon-skalle-310x174.jpg 310w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/grottlejon-skalle-1102x620.jpg 1102w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/grottlejon-skalle.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>Forskare har analyserat arvsmassan från tolv grottlejon som samlats in i Eurasien och Nordamerika. De har sedan jämfört arvsmassan med nutida lejon från Afrika och södra Asien. – Grottlejon har ofta framställts som en större och robustare version av dagens lejon. Men det vi ser är något betydligt mer anmärkningsvärt – en evolutionär linje som […]</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://forskning.se/2026/06/03/dna-avslojar-att-grottlejonet-gick-sin-egen-vag/">Dna avslöjar att grottlejonet gick sin egen väg</a> appeared first on <a href="https://forskning.se">forskning.se</a>.</p>
Scientists just built a powerful AI computer worm that learns as it spreads
This prototype could help the world prepare for AI malware threats, according to the researchers who made it
By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron
A new study shows that computer malware powered by easily accessible artificial intelligence models is here—the research is a “wake-up call” to take cybersecurity risks from AI more seriously, one expert says.
In the study , researchers created an AI-powered computer “worm” designed to attack and spread between devices—revealing a threat that they say the world is woefully underprepared to fight.
“Our results demonstrate that self-sustaining AI-driven cyber-threats are no longer theoretical,” the researchers wrote. The paper, first reported by the New York Times, was posted on the preprint server arXiv.org and has yet to be peer-reviewed.
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David Lie, a professor at the University of Toronto, who is familiar with the research but was not directly involved with the study, says the work is a “wake-up call” that should inspire cyber experts and researchers to develop countermeasures to AI-boosted bugs as fast as possible. “The demonstration here is that there’s a motivation to do this sooner rather than later,” he says.
To make the “worm”—a form of malware that spreads between devices autonomously—the researchers didn’t rely on proprietary AI models from companies such as Anthropic or OpenAI, both of which have issued warnings about the threat of their technology being used by bad actors. Instead the researchers used an undisclosed but freely available AI model “that anyone can download off the internet,” they wrote in a post on their lab’s website.
Importantly, the prototype bug was create…
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…
<p><img width="1024" height="576" src="https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Sopor-1024x576.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Soppåsar på hög." decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" srcset="https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Sopor-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Sopor-300x169.jpg 300w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Sopor-768x432.jpg 768w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Sopor-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Sopor-850x478.jpg 850w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Sopor-310x174.jpg 310w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Sopor-1102x620.jpg 1102w, https://forskning.se/app/uploads/2026/06/Sopor.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p>
<p>Att slarv föder slarv är en vanlig förklaring till varför sophantering ibland inte fungerar. Nu visar forskning från Göteborgs universitet att smutsiga soprum kan väcka äckelkänslor som ökar risken för att människor gör fel när de slänger sina sopor.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://forskning.se/2026/06/03/ackel-kan-bidra-till-felaktig-sophantering/">Äckel kan förklara varför sopor slängs fel</a> appeared first on <a href="https://forskning.se">forskning.se</a>.</p>
Visionen för samlokaliseringen av Lunds universitets Konstnärliga fakultet är nu fastställd. Den 3 juni enades fakultetsstyrelsen kring ett nytt inriktningsbeslut om att arbeta för att förverkliga ett konstnärligt campus på Heleneholmsområdet.
Fakulteten har länge arbetat för att samla Konst- Musik- och Teaterhögskolorna på en gemensam plats. Genom att samla verksamheterna vill man skapa ett mer sammanhållet campus som stärker både kärnverksamheten och den konstnärliga identiteten.
– Jag är mycket glad över att vi nu har en gemensam riktning för ett nytt konstnärligt campus i Malmö. Genom att samla de konstnärliga utbildningarna skapar Lunds universitet en tydlig mötesplats för konst och kultur. Samtidigt vill vi bygga vidare på den kreativa kraft som redan finns i området, säger Erik Renström, rektor vid Lunds universitet.
När projektet i Varvsstaden avbröts 2024 tog fakulteten tillsammans med Malmö stad fram en avsiktsförklaring om att arbeta vidare för att hitta en ny placering för ett konstnärligt campus i Malmö.
Efter att ha utrett olika alternativ har fakulteten nu landat i att de bästa förutsättningarna finns i och omkring Musikhögskolans nuvarande lokaler på Heleneholmsområdet. Området rymmer redan Musikhögskolan och flera av de lokaler som verksamheten använder i dag. Genom att även flytta Konst- och Teaterhögskolorna dit minskar behovet av nybyggnation.
– Heleneholmsområdet utgör en naturlig utgångspunkt för ett gemensamt konstnärligt campus. Genom etableringen av ett konstnärligt campus kommer fakulteten bidra till en lokal utveckling, där konstnärlig utbildning och forskning blir en aktiv del av stadens förändring, säger Santino S. Resic, dekan vid Konstnärliga fakulteten.
Genom att samla verksamheten på ett gemensamt campus vill man stärka kärnverksamheten och främja den tvärvetenskapliga forskningsmiljön.
– Vi är glada över att den Konstnärliga fakulteten vill stanna i Malmö och att de ser potential i Heleneholm. Den stora styrkan med Heleneh…
Landmark pancreatic cancer treatment paves way for targeting other tricky tumors
Unprecedented results against a stubbornly hard-to-treat cancer are boosting optimism that other challenging tumors will be next
The landmark success of a drug against an ‘undruggable’ cancer is spurring fresh optimism in the quest to treat seemingly untouchable tumour targets.
The experimental drug, daraxonrasib , disarms all three members of the RAS family of proteins, which are linked to some of the deadliest cancers. Designing drugs that target the RAS proteins has been notoriously challenging . But a large clinical trial has found that daraxonrasib nearly doubled survival — from 6.7 months to 13.2 months — in people with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer.
The results were presented to a packed room at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois, on 31 May, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine . At the conference, the talk was met with a long standing ovation, says Ecaterina Dumbrava, an oncologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “After more than a decade without major advances in treatment for pancreatic cancer, seeing this is really emotional,” she says.
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That success is raising hopes that other challenging targets might also soon fall. Nature talked to researchers about progress in targeting RAS and other “undruggable” cancer proteins that can’t be bested with conventional approaches.
RAS proteins are molecular on–off switches that help to control cell growth and division. But some mutations leave RAS proteins stuck in the ‘on’ position, which drives tumour growth.
Ideally, a cancer drug would switch these proteins off. But drugs typically work by…
<p>Under den geologiska perioden pleistocen uppstod den istida så kallade megafaunan, med stora och ibland gigantiska däggdjur som mammutar, ullhåriga noshörningar, jättehästar och uroxar. Den …</p>
<p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://fof.se/artikel/istidskyla-triggade-grottlejon-och-lejon-att-para-sig/">Istidskyla triggade grottlejon och lejon att para sig</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://fof.se">Forskning & Framsteg</a>.</p>
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 …
Pressmeddelande —
500 miljoner år gamla fossil avslöjar mossdjurens ursprung
Nya fossil från Kina visar att mossdjuren utvecklades redan under den kambriska explosionen. Fynden flyttar bak deras ursprung med 20 miljoner år och visar att de utvecklades samtidigt som de flesta andra djurgrupper uppstod. Studien har publicerats i tidskriften Nature.
Mossdjur (Bryozoa) tillhör idag havens vanligaste kolonibildande djur och lever i nästan alla vattenmiljöer, från sjöar och vattendrag till havet och en art finns till och med i Fyrisån här i Uppsala. Trots deras stora ekologiska betydelse har deras evolutionära ursprung länge varit ett mysterium. Fossil av mossdjur har tidigare bara varit säkert kända från ordovicium, cirka 480 miljoner år sedan, vilket gjort dem till ett undantag bland dagens djurgrupper som annars uppstod under den så kallade kambriska explosionen.
Nu visar nya välbevarade fossil från tidig kambrium i Kina att mossdjuren i själva verket uppstod redan för drygt 500 miljoner år sedan.
– Det här löser ett av paleontologins klassiska problem. Mossdjuren har länge varit en evolutionär gåta eftersom de verkade dyka upp mycket senare än andra djurgrupper. Våra nya fossil visar att de faktiskt utvecklades samtidigt som resten av de moderna djurstammarna, säger Lars Holmer, professor vid Uppsala universitet och medförfattare till studien.
Studien bygger på fossil från Xiannüdong-formationen i södra Kina. Forskare har även i en tidigare studie av dessa fossil undersökt en annan möjlig mossdjursart Protomelission gatehousei, vars släktskap dock på senare tid varit mycket omdiskuterat. De nya bättre bevarade fynden visar klart på släktskap med mossdjuren.
Unika fossil avslöjar mjukdelar
Det som gör fynden särskilt viktiga är att fossilen inte bara bevarar de mikroskopiska koloniernas skelett, utan även detaljer av mjukdelar. Forskarna kunde identifiera anatomiska strukturer som muskler, membransäckar och skiljeväggar mellan individerna i kolonin – kännetecken som…
Queen-cell wax helps shape honeybee queen development, challenging the idea that royal jelly alone makes a queen, a new study suggests.
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.
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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…
In holographic theories, physicists may have traced the pliability of space-time to its quantum roots: a measure of quantumness known as “magic.” <p>The post <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/entanglement-builds-space-time-now-magic-gives-it-gravity-20260603/" target="_blank">Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now “Magic” Gives It Gravity.</a> first appeared on <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org" target="_blank">Quanta Magazine</a></p>
NASA’s Mars mission MAVEN is lost forever
MAVEN was the first successful mission designed to study the atmosphere of Mars. It also became a vital node of NASA’s communications network at the Red Planet
NASA has officially lost a decade-old Mars orbiter that performed vital scientific and communications work at the Red Planet.
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which launched in November 2013, was the first successful spacecraft dedicated to studying the atmosphere of the Red Planet and became a key node in the communications network supporting NASA’s Mars rovers on the surface. But MAVEN’s decade-long tenure has come to an end after NASA lost contact with the spacecraft last December and was unable to reestablish control over the orbiter.
“The science MAVEN has given us is key to informing what kind of radiation protection and safety measures we must take before sending humans to Mars,” said Louise Prockter, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA, in a June 3 statement . “The data collected from MAVEN will continue to provide valuable insight into Mars for decades to come.”
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The new announcement about MAVEN has come after a preliminary report from an anomaly review board that NASA convened in February to investigate the status of the spacecraft. MAVEN’s troubles started abruptly while it was on the far side of Mars from Earth. NASA’s last detailed information from the spacecraft came on December 4, after which a small amount of additional tracking data were delivered on December 6.
Those data suggested to NASA engineers that the spacecraft was “rotating in an unexpected manner” and that its “orbit trajectory may have changed,” the agency wrote last December . That fear appeared to b…
In this edition of STAT's AI Prognosis: Brittany Trang analyzes the pope's encyclical on artificial intelligence for takeaways relevant for health care.
New guidance for gene therapy developers, Lilly's deal for kidney drugs, and more biotech news from The Readout
Taking weight loss drugs for at least three years could prevent thousands of knee replacements a year, a new study found
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…