Tim Faulkner at Aussie Ark gets ready to release a Tasmanian devil in a fenced sanctuary at Barrington Tops, AustraliaJames WoodfordIm sharing a ride with two very cranky and confused Tasmanian devils, loaded in the back of our all-terrain vehicle inside large plastic traps. These devils are a long way from their species home on the island of Tasmania. Instead, we are bumping along inside a wild but securely fenced 400-hectare sanctuary in Barrington Tops, 4 hours north of Sydney, Australia.Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) did live on the Australian mainland once upon a time, but

Flu vaccination rates this year are on par with 2024 among adults, but have dipped in childrenTess Crowley/Chicago Tribune/Getty ImagesWhile the US declared its intention to leave the World Health Organization (WHO) on 20 January, the process of severing ties with the international public health body formally takes one year. Yet US health agencies have already retreated from nearly all coordinated global health efforts around influenza surveillance. The move could jeopardise the efficacy of the next batch of flu vaccines both for the US and the rest of the world.

EnvironmentRock dust, compost and biochar can all help capture carbon dioxide and boost crop yields when spread on soil but researchers are discovering they may be even more effective when used in combination 21 February 2025 Wilbourne Farm in VirginiaJames DinneenKade Wilbourne pulls a lever, and several tonnes of volcanic rock shoot out onto the field behind us in a fan of blue-grey dust. We are sitting in the cockpit of a tractor on the Wilbourne Farm in Mecklenburg County, Virginia. Normally, soybean and corn yields are the metrics that matter most here. But today, what counts is carbon.The soil on farms like this is already a major reservoir of carbon, contained in organic form in the bodies of microbes

The black hair conditioner on the left is derived from the wood powder on the rightFengyang Wang/Stockholm UniversityThis sustainable, wood-based hair conditioner may be pitch black and smell like peat, but its creators claim it could be the future of haircare after tests suggest it may work just as well as commercial products. We are using the power of nature, says Ievgen Pylypchuk at Stockholm University in Sweden. We combine a high level of science with old traditions [to] get something really cool: simple, useful and quite effective. AdvertisementPylypchuk and his colleagues used lignin, a polymer that is a central component of wood and bark, as the starting point for their bio-based conditioner. When extracted from wood, lignin naturally interacts with waterThe researchers combined a lignin gel developed in their laboratory with coconut oil and water to make the end product. Team member Mika Sipponen, also at Stockholm University, claims it works almost as well as commercial conditioners. When used on samples of wetted bleached human hair and then washed out, it reduced the drag when combing the hair while it was still damp by 13 per cent, compared with the commercial product they tested, which reduced drag by 20 per cent. One potential downside is that the current formulation of the conditioner is pitch black and smells like cooked wood, similar to peat, says Sipponen. That hasnt deterred the researchers from contemplating commercialising it. They tested the formula on hair, towels and pig skin, and say it washes off without leaving stains. Even the smell is quite pleasant, says Pylypchuk. I personally like it very much, and most of the people in our lab maybe because they work with lignin they liked it. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterPylypchuk and Sipponen have a patent for the lignin gel and hope their conditioner can become a consumer product, offering people a more sustainable alternative to current products that rely on ingredients derived from fossil fuels. They say the next step is to see if it causes eye and skin irritation ahead of any trial on living hair. But US-based cosmetics researcherTrefor Evans,formerly at the Textile Research Institute Princeton, New Jersey, has doubts about how well the product would perform compared with commercial rivals. Ive been doing these experiments for 30 years, and a conventional conditioner product will lower the combing forces by 80 per cent, maybe even 90 per cent, he says. Sipponen thinks variation in the testing methods and condition of the hair under analysis could explain why his team only found a 20 per cent reduction for the commercial conditioner.The wood-based conditioners appearance and unusual smell may also put consumers off, says Evans. The patent literature is absolutely chock-a-block with potential hair conditioner formulas that never went anywhere, he says. And the reason is because you dont just need efficacy for the consumer to buy it, what you really need as well is aesthetics. So, would a black, wood-smelling, eco-friendly conditioner be a hit with consumers? Sounds like a bit of a non-starter, says Evans. Journal referenceScience Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr8372Topics:cosmetics

Does time move backwards in some situations?sakkmesterke/AlamySome quantum systems may have two arrows of time, one running forwards as usual and another moving backwards. This means that, at some extremely small scales, time may have the option of moving in both directions a stunning feature that may have been overlooked across much of physics.If you consider the most basic equations of quantum physics those that deal with single particles there is no reason why time should always run forwards. This means fundamental

Astronomers have raced to observe asteroid 2024 YR4NASA/Magdalena Ridge 2.4m telescope/New Mexico Institute of Technology/RyanThe worlds space agencies have reduced the chances of asteroid 2024 YR4 impacting Earth to below 1 per cent, which strongly suggests that a potentially devastating collision will be avoided. However, the asteroid will still probably pass extraordinarily near to our planet, giving astronomers a rare opportunity to observe an asteroid up close.We are not expecting the impact probability to rise back above 1 per cent for the close approach with Earth in 2032, says Richard Moissl at the European Space Agency (ESA). The most likely further development is a further drop in the impact probability, likely even to 0. AdvertisementAlarms about asteroid 2024 YR4 were first raised in December last year, when astronomers found it might be on a collision course for Earth in 2032. It appears to be between 40 and 90 metres wide and could generate a deadly blast should it hit a city. In the following weeks, the worlds telescopes and space agencies closely tracked its trajectory, honing its future path with greater precision. It reached its highest impact risk on 17 February, with a 1-in-32 chance, but in the days after, this fell to 1-in-67, or a 1.5 per cent risk.On 20 February, new observations led to a sharp downgrade of this risk, with NASA putting it at a 0.27 per cent chance of impact, or 1-in-360, and ESA even lower, at 0.16 per cent, or 1-in-625. These ratings put it at a 1 on the 10-point Torino scale used to assess the hazard posed by such objects. That score is down from 3, meaning 2024 YR4 is now considered one of many low-risk asteroids that are discovered each year, but that ultimately miss Earth.This is good news, says Gareth Collins at Imperial College London, but the asteroid will still be useful as a dry run for our planetary defence systems and for scientific purposes. This is still something that will make a spectacularly close approach. If the risk of hitting was as high as it was, it must be coming very close to us, he says. Voyage across the galaxy and beyond with our space newsletter every month.Sign up to newsletterNASA, ESA and space companies that were sketching out possible schemes to deflect the asteroid will probably continue planning, says Niklas Voigt at OHB, a German space company. Voigt and his team had begun thinking about a mission to divert 2024 YR4, and the new risk doesnt change that, he says. The risk decreased, but for the time being we are still proceeding with work on the topic.The close approach could still be a good opportunity to test our ability to deflect asteroids, says Voigt the only previous attempt to do this was NASAs DART mission, which successfully changed the trajectory of the 160-metre-wide asteroid Dimorphos in 2022. Or we could build a satellite to send to 2024 YR4, he says, similar to ESAs Ramses satellite due to travel to observe the asteroid Apophis, which is set to pass close to Earth in 2029.A final decision on what to do about 2024 YR4 probably wont be made until planned observations in March using the James Webb Space Telescope. As well as gathering trajectory data, this will better assess the size and composition of the asteroid. That information will be then fed to the United Nations-backed Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, which will decide on a best course of action around the end of April. These are incredibly useful exercises for finding out the pinch points to make decisions, in order to still have time to do something sensible in advance, says Collins. Absolutely, those committees will still be meeting, but theyll probably be less stressful.While the chances of an Earth impact have plummeted, the risk of 2024 YR4 hitting the moon have risen to 1.2 per cent, up from 0.3 per cent. There is a distinct possibility of that number rising further, says Moissl. The exact effects for an impact on the moon from an object of this size are still under evaluation.The response to this object has also been a useful rehearsal for other asteroids of concern that crop up, says Collins. We want to avoid, in future, a cry wolf situation where the public gets so used to this threat that they think, oh, it never happens.Topics:asteroids

Brain organoids derived from human embryonic stem cells being grown in the labARTHUR CHIEN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYHuman mini-brains that contain 80 per cent of the cell types in a 40-day-old fetal brain have been created by fusing different organoids together.Were getting to the point that we are getting closer to the fetal brain, says Annie Kathuria at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. The reason for doing this is to create organoids that are better suited for studying conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, which is hard to do in animals, she says.

DNA can store digital data, such as visual and audio filesScience Picture Co / AlamyArtificial intelligence can read data stored in DNA strands within 10 minutes rather than the days required for previous methods, bringing DNA storage closer to practical use in computing.DNA can store vast amounts of data in an extremely compact form and remain intact for thousands of years, says Daniella Bar-Lev at the University of California, San Diego. Additionally, DNA is naturally replicable, offering a unique advantage for long-term data preservation. AdvertisementBut retrieving the information encoded within DNA is a monumental challenge because the strands are mixed and jumbled together when stored. During the data-encoding process, individual strands are sometimes replicated imperfectly, and some fragments may be lost entirely. As a result, reading data stored in DNA can resemble reconstructing a book from a box filled with shredded, typo-ridden pages.Traditional methods struggle with this chaos, requiring days of processing, says Bar-Lev. The new approach streamlines this with AI trained to spot patterns in the noise, she says.Bar-Lev and her colleagues developed an AI-powered method called DNAformer that can quickly and accurately decode jumbled DNA sequences. The system includes a deep learning AI model trained to reconstruct DNA sequences, a separate computer algorithm that identifies and corrects errors and a third decoding algorithm that converts everything back into digital data while fixing any remaining mistakes. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterIn experiments, DNAformer could read 100 megabytes of DNA-stored data nearly 90 times faster than the next fastest method which was developed with traditional, rules-based computing algorithms while achieving better or comparable accuracy. The decoded data included a coloured image of test tubes, a 24-second audio clip of astronaut Neil Armstrongs famous moon landing speech and written text about why DNA is a promising data storage medium.The team plans to develop versions of DNAformer tailored to newer techniques for encoding data into DNA, says Omer Sabary at Technion Israel Institute of Technology.Crucially, because our approach does not rely on specific [DNA] synthesis or sequencing methods, it can be adapted to future, as-yet-undeveloped technologies that may be more commercially viable, he says.Journal referenceNature Machine Intelligence DOI: 10.1038/s42256-025-01003-zTopics:

Fly AgaricMarshmallow Laser FeastSoils around the world are polluted, worn out, over-fertilised and exhausted. How did we get to a place where we think of soil as dirt? Soils are buzzing with life, criss-crossed with a hard-to-fathom complexity of connections, a multitude of symbiotic partnerships between plant roots, mycorrhizal fungi and nitrogen-fixing bacteria.Up to half of the living biomass of soils is composed of these networks. Soils soak up about a third of the carbon humans put into the atmosphere each year. They hold three times more carbon than living biomass above ground, and twice the amount in the atmosphere. We have to rediscover the vital importance of soil in our lives and in the planets future and that is the aim of a new exhibition at Somerset House in London, SOIL: The World at Our Feet, co-curated by Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy, running until 13 April.Unearthed MyceliumJo Pearl/Elsa PearlAdvertisementPictured above is a ceramic representation of fungi and their mycelial network in soil: Unearthed Mycelium by Jo Pearl, whose stated mission is breathing life into clay and clay into life. Pictured below is the work A Diversity of Forms. These stunning bacterial colonies were grown by Elze Hesse and photographed by Tim Cockerill. The main picture is Fly Agaric I, by art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast. This installation depicts living, pulsing underground symbiotic networks.We cant cherish what we dont know, says Pearl. And if we are to save our soil, we must take a closer look at what is often dismissed as dirt and realise our lives depend on its aliveness.A Diversity of Forms.Dr Tim CockerillTopics:

What marks out individuals fromeach other? Is it possible tochange personality overnight?Neil Massey/Millennium Images, UKOur Brains, Our SelvesMasud Husain (Canongate Books)What makes us who we are? Most of us ask this question at least once in our lifetimes. Personally, I wonder about it all the time. As an extrovert, much of my identity is built around being outgoing and friendly: these traits make me, me. But where do they come from? How durable are they? Could I wake up one day as someone who is reserved, quiet and calm? It is an unnerving thought.

Satellite view of Mount Fentale in EthiopiaGallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025A volcano in Ethiopia is spewing unusually large volumes of methane from its crater, according to satellite measurements of the potent greenhouse gas. This comes after hundreds of earthquakes have shaken the region over the past few months, prompting tens of thousands of people to evacuate ahead of a potential eruption.A European Union satellite was the first to detect methane in the region around Mount Fentale, an active volcano in the Great Rift valley about 120 kilometres east of Ethiopias largest city, Addis Ababa. This

A mouse tends to an unconscious peer by pulling its tongueWenjian Sun et al. 2025When they find another mouse unconscious, some mice seemingly try to revive their companion by pawing at them, biting and even pulling their tongue aside to clear their airways. The finding hints that caregiving behaviour might be more common in the animal kingdom than we thought.There are rare reports of large, social mammals trying to help incapacitated members of their species, such as wild chimpanzees touching and licking wounded peers, dolphins attempting to push a distressed pod mate to the surface so it can breathe and elephants rendering assistance to ailing relatives.Now, Li Zhang at the University of Southern California (USC) and his colleagues have filmed what happened when they presented laboratory mice with a familiar cage mate that was either active or anaesthetised and unresponsive.Over a series of tests, on average the animals devoted about 47 per cent of a 13-minute observation window to interacting with the unconscious partner, showing three sorts of behaviour.They start with sniffing, and then grooming, and then with a very intensive or physical interaction, says Zhang. They really open the mouth of this animal and pull out its tongue. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterThese more physical interactions also involved licking the eyes and biting the mouth area. After focusing on the mouth, the mice pulled on the tongue of their unresponsive partner in more than 50 per cent of cases.In a separate test, researchers gently placed a non-toxic plastic ball in the mouth of the unconscious mouse. In 80 per cent of cases, the helping mice successfully removed the object.If we extended the observation window, maybe the success rate could be even higher, says team member Huizhong Tao, also at USC.Mice that were attended to woke up and started walking again faster than uncared for mice, and once their charge had responded by moving, the carer mice slowed and then stopped their caregiving behaviour.The carer mice also spent more time tending to unconscious mice if they were familiar with them than if they hadnt previously met.The recuperative behaviour isnt an analogue of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, which requires specialist training, says Zhang. It is more like using strong smelling salts or a slap to wake someone or performing basic first aid to ensure an unconscious person can breathe. Positioning an anaesthetised patients tongue so it doesnt block their airway is also important during surgery, he says.Zhang and his colleagues found that the behaviours were driven by oxytocin-releasing neurons in the amygdala and hypothalamus regions of the brain. The hormone oxytocin is involved in other caring behaviours across a wide range of vertebrate species.Similar behaviour is reported in laboratory mice in an accompanying research paper by another team and was also described by a third team last month.I have never observed these types of behaviours when we run experiments in the lab, but we never placed a recovering animal with a partner until they were fully awake, says Cristina Mrquez at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology in Coimbra, Portugal. The fact that three independent laboratories have observed similar behaviours indicates that this is a robust finding. However, we should be really careful about anthropomorphising too much what we observe in non-human species or attributing intentions that go beyond what is observed.Zhang and his colleagues think the behaviour is innate rather than learned, partly because all the tested animals were just 2 to 3 months old and hadnt seen this behaviour or anaesthetised cage mates before.He suggests that such instinctive behaviour plays a part in enhancing group cohesion and may be more widely present among social animals than we have seen so far.Seeing this behaviour in wild mice might be hard, says Mrquez. Mice are prey animals that often do not live in big groups, thus usually they will hide quite well from us humans. But [the fact] that we dont see it does not mean that they dont do it.Journal reference:Science DOI: 10.1126/science.adq2677Topics:animals

Extreme weather, including hurricanes, has increased with climate changeMODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFCThe US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) presents a briefing summarising the global climate each month and in the first of these calls under the Trump administration, NOAA researchers avoided making any link between Januarys record high global temperatures and climate change caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.Its not great for science. Its not great for truth, says David Ho at the University

NASAs James Webb Space Telescope has captured a tightly bound pair of actively forming stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47NASA, ESA, CSAWith some regularity, I get asked the difference between astronomy and astrophysics. I suppose Im a good person to ask: Of my three degrees, two of them are in astronomy and astrophysics. But what this merger means is that even we astronomers and astrophysicists have given up telling the difference between the two. How does astronomy fit into physics? Well, my position is that astronomy is now essentially an area of physics, but I know some people

Cuttlefish have a variety of camouflage techniquesUniversity of BristolCuttlefish use dazzling camouflage to disguise themselves while stalking their prey. New video footage reveals even more about their dramatic mimicry techniques, including how they transform to look like a non-threatening object such as a leaf or coral.These are masters, the hypnotists of the underwater world, says Matteo Santon at the University of Bristol, UK.Cuttlefish can change their colour and texture in less than a second thanks to millions of pigment sacs in

TechnologyQuestioning a chatbot that has been trained on bestselling books from a particular decade can give researchers a measure of the social biases of that era 20 February 2025 Books can document the cultural biases of the era when they were publishedAnn Taylor/AlamyArtificial intelligences picking up sexist and racist biases is a well-known and persistent problem, but researchers are now turning this to their advantage to analyse social attitudes through history. Training AI models on novels from a certain decade can instil them with the prejudices of that era, offering a new way to study how cultural biases have evolved over time.Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT learn by analysing large collections of text. They tend to inherit the biases found within their training data:

Brahim RayintakathIn the coming decades, we might figure out how to make an entirely new kind of life: a mirror cell, in which every molecule is the mirror image of those found in normal cells. Such reversed cells have probably never existed on our planet in its 4.5-billion-year history. Yet we could one day make them perhaps as a way to make new drugs, or simply out of pure scientific curiosity about the origins and evolution of life.But should we? According to a coalition of synthetic biologists and biosafety specialists, the answer is a resounding no. Mirror life, they argue, would pose unprecedented risks to the health of every living organism on the planet. If it got out, we might never be able to recapture it, leading to pervasive lethal infections.Its an apocalyptic-sounding threat, but would it really be as dangerous as the team argues if we managed to create these new life forms? And although mirror life could be decades away, could there be things we can do now to reduce the risk?Many of the essential molecules of life can exist in two mirrored forms, like a persons left and right hands. While these chiral molecules are difficult to distinguish from each other, their distinct shapes cause them to behave differently. No matter how much you rotate a left-handed molecule, you will never get it to match a right-handed one.

Josie FordFeedback is New Scientists 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 Solved! Or notFeedback is as fond of true crime as the next morbidly curious ghoul, so we have occasionally dipped our toes into the never-ending well of speculation about the Whitechapel murders of 1888-91 and the near-mythical Jack the Ripper. Although frankly, we didnt get much further than Alan Moore and Eddie Campbells From Hell, which (spoiler!) ties the killings to the British establishment and the Freemasons, who supposedly arranged the murders to create an evil psychic force that would perpetuate the patriarchy. But the field of Ripperology extends far beyond one eccentric graphic novel.So our attention was drawn to recent news stories reporting calls for a fresh inquest backed by Karen Miller, a distant descendant of Catherine Eddowes, one of the cases five murdered women.AdvertisementIt all hinges on a shawl that supposedly belonged to Eddowes, which was collected by a police officer at the time and kept in his family for over a century. The shawl came up at auction in 2007 and was bought by Ripperologist Russell Edwards. He arranged for the shawl to undergo DNA testing, the results of which were published in 2019. Geneticists Jari Louhelainen and David Miller obtained mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from two people. One had genetic markers in common with Karen Miller, suggesting it came from Eddowes. The other matched a distant relative of Aaron Kosminski, a barber who was a suspect at the time of the killings.For Edwards, this is proof that Kosminski was the murderer a scenario he has promoted in his book Naming Jack the Ripper. Other Ripperologists are sceptical: social scientist Katie Charlwood points out there is no reliable chain of custody for the shawl, and no evidence the five murders were all committed by the same person.Feedback is in no doubt this story will rumble on forever, but we do want to add something something not one of the recent news stories picked up on. We looked at the 2019 study and discovered that the editors had added an expression of concern in August 2024.It mentions concerns raised by third parties after publication, as well as letters to the editor. And then comes the bombshell: During the investigation, the publisher and Editor-in-Chief made every effort to obtain from the authors the original raw data from the mtDNA analysis. However, the authors stated that the data were no longer available, due to instrument data failure and other complications.Yes, you read that right the crucial mtDNA evidence can never be verified, because the authors have lost it. Maybe Moore was right about the evil psychic force after all.The equation for loveHeres a romantic tale. News editor Alexandra Thompson draws our attention to a preprint entitled, A Formula for Love: Partner merit and appreciation beget actor significance.The authors argue that romantic love is a means to the end of feeling significant and worthy. Feedback isnt sure about that, but lets go with it. This leads them to a multiplicative tri-factor model that determines the likelihood of the actor falling in love with the partner.Specifically: Love for a partner depends on the actors perceptions that (1) the partner possesses meritorious characteristics, and (2) that they appreciate the actor and view them as significant. We assume that these two factors multiplicatively combine with the magnitude of actors quest for significance to determine the likelihood of the actor becoming enamored with partner.In other words, the likelihood of you falling for someone is a combination of how good you think they are, how much you think they appreciate you and how much you care about finding meaning in your life.Feedback tried to extrapolate this into dating advice. The frequent suggestion that one should play hard to get seems counterproductive, if the amount of appreciation you show your partner is a predictor of whether they fall for you. Instead, it seems like a good idea to seek out a partner who is engaged in a desperate quest for significance in life, because they are more prone to falling in love. However, this might have its own downsides, not least the distinct possibility that such a partner might join a cult.Good luck out there, folks.Biting the hand that bitVia news editor Jacob Aron and the Financial Times, Feedback learns that AI company Anthropic doesnt want potential employees to use AI when writing job applications. Their job ads say: While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. But why, Anthropic? Could it be that the AI letters are full of guff that is unbearably tedious to sift through?By curious coincidence, Feedback learned of this just days after news broke that Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has outperformed US tech giants. OpenAI promptly complained, saying it was reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models that is, engaged in copyright theft.To sum up, these AI companies dont like being bombarded with AI-written slop and they dont like it if their work is used to train an AI without permission. As a writer whose work has almost certainly been scraped by AI companies, and who has not seen a penny in return, Feedback can only say: Bwahahaha, sucks to be you.Got a story for Feedback?You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This weeks and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

Comment and TechnologyHumans learn very differently to machines, thanks to our biased, malleable memory and that's a good thing, says Charan Ranganath, director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis 19 February 2025 Adri VoltArtificial intelligence has humans beat at least when it comes to games like chess and Go, identifying the 3D structure of proteins, generating investment strategiesthe list goes on and on. Some argue that models like ChatGPT are already at the threshold of human intelligence. OpenAI head Sam Altman even threw his unborn child under the bus, claiming my kid is never gonna grow up being smarter than AI.The capabilities of modern AI are certainly impressive, but I am deeply sceptical about comparisons between humans and machines. AI (at present and in the foreseeable future) isnt all that smart, or

An artists impression of the star WOH G64ESO/L. CaladaOne of the largest stars in the known universe is undergoing a strangely rapid transformation and may soon explode as a supernova.First catalogued in 1981, WOH G64 sits some 160,000 light years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It is one of the biggest red supergiants, the largest stars we know of. These are massive, cool stars that have run out of hydrogen fuel in their core and instead burn an envelope of hydrogen gas that surrounds them.

Plastic litter on beaches is causing plastiglomerate rocks to formLiz Barney/Guardian/eyevineDiscardedSarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz (Oxford University Press)Humanity has fallen. The last people are long dead after our inadequate efforts to cut carbon emissions let global warming continue unchecked. Most animals and plants were wiped out in the sixth mass extinction to hit our planet.Millions of years have passed and the few hardy species that survived have evolved to create a novel array of endless and beautiful forms. A new intelligent species has come to dominate Earth with the help of complex machines. They are

Speaking more than one language appears to boost our brain in multiple waysEiko Tsuchiya/ShutterstockParlez-vous Franais? Learning another language may stave off Alzheimers and other types of dementia and its never too late to start.Bilingualism was first linked with the deferral of dementia in 2007, when Ellen Bialystok at York University in Toronto and her colleagues examined the records of people who had been referred to a memory clinic and diagnosed with dementia. Of the 184 people in their analysis,symptoms appeared four years later in those who were bilingual than in their monolingual peers.

Women lining up at a mobile tent for reproductive health services at a clinic in ZimbabweMSI Zimbabwe/Arete/Tendai MarimaThe day Donald Trump took office as president of the United States, he issued an order temporarily pausing foreign aid, including the funding that flows through the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The funding freeze will have permanent consequences. It has already crippled global health programmes, including critical reproductive health services, placing millions of lives at risk particularly those serviced by providers in lower-income countries.Population Services Zimbabwe

Majorana 1, a quantum chip that relies on topological qubitsJohn Brecher/MicrosoftMicrosoft researchers say they have created topological qubits, long sought-after components for a radically different kind of quantum computer. This isnt the first time the firm has made this claim it attempted to produce these error-proof quantum bits in a similar experiment in 2023, but the results werent fully conclusive, raising doubts among colleagues in the field about whether it has fully worked this time.Topological qubits could solve one of quantum computings biggest problems: all

Olivine rock naturally reacts with carbon dioxide, but it is a slow businessRenhour48 via Wikimedia/CC0 1.0 UniversalA new process could enable crushed rocks to capture carbon dioxide from the air much more quickly, turbocharging a carbon removal technique that is already being widely adopted.Natural silicate minerals such as basalt react with water and CO2 to form solid carbonate materials, a process known as enhanced rock weathering (ERW). Studies suggest spreading crushed silicate rocks on agricultural land can increase the amount of carbon that soils can absorb, while also improving crop yields for farmers. AdvertisementBut Matthew Kanan at Stanford University in California believes the carbon benefits of ERW have been overblown, because natural silicates dont weather quickly enough to extract meaningful amounts of carbon from the air. The data is very clear: they do not weather at useful rates, he says.Converting silicates into more reactive minerals would increase the weathering rate, making ERW a viable climate solution, he says. Kanan and his colleague Yuxuan Chen, also at Stanford University, have developed a way to produce magnesium oxide and calcium silicate using a process inspired by cement production.You can take a calcium source and a magnesium silicate, heat them up, and you end up making a calcium silicate and a magnesium oxide, says Kanan. The core reaction is what we call an ion exchange, where we are swapping magnesium for calcium. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterThe reason thats powerful is because now that calcium silicate is reactive and so is the magnesium oxide, he says. I put in one reactive thing and I get two out. The materials weather thousands of times faster than standard silicates, says Kanan.The kilns used in the process need to be heated to 1400C for the reaction, with the energy likely to be provided by natural gas. This means the method would produce significant carbon emissions, but Kanan suggests these could either be captured at source or offset by reserving some of the reactive minerals to capture on-site emissions.Once the emissions involved in producing the materials are accounted for, 1 tonne of reactive material removes about 1 tonne of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The researchers can currently make 15 kilograms a day of reactive rocks, but hope to turn the idea into a commercial venture by selling the materials to farmers to use on agricultural land.Rachael James at the University of Southampton, UK, contests Kanans claim that conventional ERW doesnt work, pointing out that there are many documented examples of successful enhanced weathering trials. But she welcomes any attempt to accelerate the weathering rate of silicates.Anything we can do to speed up weathering rates would be hugely beneficial, because the climate crisis needs action now, she says. Weathering is an inherently slow process and, frankly, Id rather see meaningful carbon dioxide removal on timescales of 10 years than 50 years.However, she warns that the team is likely to face issues with scaling up production and deployment. Using the minerals in an agricultural system may not guarantee all the captured carbon is locked away permanently, she says.Phil Renforth at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, says the proposal is a clever idea, but much more research is needed to understand how it should be deployed. They essentially produce cement minerals, which may not be ideal candidate minerals for the addition to agricultural soils, he says.Journal reference:Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08499-2 Topics:

EnvironmentNobody doubts that human activities have dramatically transformed Earth, so why has there been no official recognition of the Anthropocene? 19 February 2025 Horizon International Images/AlamyOn a cosmological timescale, humanitys existence is a mere blip. Yet, in our short lifetime, we have done outsized damage to Earth, so much so that some believe we need to invent a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, to recognise the global change our species has caused. Technically speaking, we arent yet in the Anthropocene but that is largely because experts cant agree about when it started.Ask most geologists and they will say we are still in the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 11,700 years ago and is characterised by a period of planetary stability when human civilisation flourished. But therein lies the rub: our influence on Earth systems means these characteristics no longer apply, and a growing number of scientists believe a new epoch must be recognised. Enter the Anthropocene. There is debate about who coined the term, but it was popularised in 2000 by atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer. They argued that the Anthropocene began in the latter part of the eighteenth century, around the time that global greenhouse gas emissions began to rise as the industrial revolution gathered steam. However, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) begged to differ. Established in 2009 and tasked with coming up with a formal definition of the epoch, its members said that the effects of human activity at that time were too scattered to provide a picture of global change. Instead, the date they came up with was 1952.The mid-20th century worked much better than any of the other candidates, says

The Rhne glacier in the Swiss Alps in 2024FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty ImagesGlaciers worldwide have shrunk by more than 5 per cent on average since 2000, according to the most comprehensive assessment yet. This rapid rate of melting has accelerated by more than a third in the past decade as climate change continues apace.Any degree of warming matters for glaciers, says Noel Gourmelen at the University of Edinburgh, UK. They are a barometer for climate change. AdvertisementThe new numbers come from a global consortium of hundreds of researchers called the Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise. The group aimed to reduce the uncertainty around how much the planets 200,000 or so glaciers have melted by using a standard procedure to assess different measures of their change in size. This includes gravity and elevation measurements from 20 satellites as well as ground-based measurements.Between 2000 and 2011, glaciers were melting at a rate of about 231 billion tonnes of ice per year on average, the researchers found. This melt rate increased between 2012 and 2023 to 314 billion tonnes per year, an acceleration of more than a third. 2023 saw a record loss of mass of around 548 billion tonnes.These numbers are in line with previous estimates. But this comprehensive look provides a bit more confidence about the change that we see on glaciers, says Gourmelen, who is part of the consortium. And theres a clear acceleration. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterAltogether, the thawing of more than 7 trillion tonnes of glacial ice since 2000 has raised sea levels by almost 2 centimetres, making this melt the second biggest contributor to sea level rise so far, behind the expansion of water due to warming oceans.This is a consistent story of glacial change, says Tyler Sutterley at the University of Washington in Seattle. Regions that have had glaciers since time immemorial are losing these icons of ice.Glaciers in the Alps have lost more ice than any other region, shrinking by nearly 40 per cent since 2000. In the Middle East, New Zealand and western North America, glaciers have also seen reductions of more than 20 per cent. Depending on future emissions, the worlds glaciers are projected to lose between a quarter and half of their ice by the end of the century.Journal reference:Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08545-zTopics:

The Muse AI was trained on the video game Bleeding EdgeMicrosoftAn artificial intelligence model from Microsoft can recreate realistic video game footage that the company says could help designers make games, but experts are unconvinced that the tool will be useful for most game developers.Neural networks that can produce coherent and accurate footage from video games are not new. A recent Google-created AI generated a fully playable version of the classic computer game Doom without access to the underlying game engine. The original Doom, however, was released in 1993; more modern games are far more complex, with sophisticated physics and computationally intensive graphics, which have proved trickier for AIs to faithfully recreate. AdvertisementNow, Katja Hofmann at Microsoft Research and her colleagues have developed an AI model called Muse, which can recreate full sequences of the multiplayer online battle game Bleeding Edge. These sequences appear to obey the games underlying physics and keep players and in-game objects consistent over time, which implies that the model has grasped a deep understanding of the game, says Hofmann.Muse is trained on seven years of human gameplay data, including both controller and video footage, provided by Bleeding Edges Microsoft-owned developer, Ninja Studios. It works similarly to large language models like ChatGPT; when given an input, in the form of a video game frame and its associated controller actions, it is tasked with predicting the gameplay that might come next. Its really quite mind-boggling, even to me now, that purely from training models to predict whats going to appear next it learns a sophisticated, deep understanding of this complex 3D environment, says Hofmann.To understand how people might use an AI tool like Muse, the team also surveyed game developers to learn what features they would find useful. As a result, the researchers added the capability to iteratively adjust to changes made on the fly, such as a players character changing or new objects entering a scene. This could be useful for coming up with new ideas and trying out what-if scenarios for developers, says Hofmann. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterBut Muse is still limited to generating sequences within the bounds of the original Bleeding Edge game it cant come up with new concepts or designs. And it is unclear if this is an inherent limitation of the model, or something that could be overcome with more training data from other games, says Mike Cook at Kings College London. This is a long, long way away from the idea that AI systems can design games on their own.While the ability to generate consistent gameplay sequences is impressive, developers might prefer to have greater control, says Cook. If you build a tool that is actually testing your game, running the game code itself, you dont need to worry about persistency or consistency, because its running the actual game. So these are solving problems that generative AI has itself introduced.Its promising that the model is designed with developers in mind, says Georgios Yannakakis at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, but it might not be feasible for most developers who dont have so much training data. It comes down to the question of is it worth doing? says Yannakakis. Microsoft spent seven years collecting data and training these models to demonstrate that you can actually do it. But would an actual game studio afford [to do] this?Even Microsoft itself is equivocal over whether AI-designed games could be on the horizon: when asked if developers in its Xbox gaming division might use the tool, the company declined to comment.While Hofmann and her team are hopeful that future versions of Muse will be able to generalise beyond their training data coming up with new scenarios and levels for games on which they are trained, as well as working for different games this will be a significant challenge, says Cook, because modern games are so complex.One of the ways a game distinguishes itself is by changing systems and introducing new conceptual level ideas. That makes it very hard for machine learning systems to get outside of their training data and innovate and invent beyond what theyve seen, he says.Topics:video games

Kip Evans/AlamyOn Earth, the land moves. Over millions of years, continents shift and the entire surface of the planet reshapes itself. The driver of all this is plate tectonics: Earths surface is divided into several dozen plates, which move horizontally. Figuring out how this got started, however, has proved surprisingly challenging. Research has come up with dates ranging from 800 million years ago to 4 billion years ago, not long after the planet formed. Now, the reason for this huge discrepancy is finally becoming apparent.Today, plate tectonics is a global process. Everywhere, plates are imperceptibly moving. At mid-ocean ridges, hot magma oozes up from inside Earth, forming new crust and pushing the plates apart. Where two collide, one is forced under the other, destroying it, in a process called subduction.Things were very different when Earth was new notably, it was much hotter, which meant the rocks of the crust were softer. But what that crust was doing is unclear. Some researchers argue there was a stagnant lid: the crust barely moved, leaving the same rocks at the surface for hundreds of millions of years. Others think plates moved vertically rather than horizontally, as denser rocks sank and less dense ones rose. Somehow, the crust divided into plates and they started moving horizontally. But when?A decade ago, many researchers argued that plate tectonics began between 3 billion and 3.2 billion years ago, says Nadja Drabon at Harvard University. Several lines of evidence pointed to big changes at that time, including the first evidence of minerals that only form

Googles AI co-scientist is based on the firms Gemini large language modelsRaa/NurPhoto/ShutterstockGoogle has unveiled an experimental artificial intelligence system that uses advanced reasoning to help scientists synthesize vast amounts of literature, generate novel hypotheses, and suggest detailed research plans, according to its press release. The idea with [the] AI co-scientist is to give scientists superpowers, says Alan Karthikesalingam at Google.The tool, which doesnt have an official name yet,builds on Googles Gemini large language models. When a researcher asks a question or specifies a goal to find a new drug, say the tool comes up with initial ideas within 15 minutes. Several Gemini agents then debate these hypotheses with each other, ranking them and improving them over the following hours and days, says Vivek Natarajan at Google. AdvertisementDuring this process, the agents can search the scientific literature, access databases and use tools such as Googles AlphaFold system for predicting the structure of proteins. They continuously refine ideas, they debate ideas, they critique ideas, says Natarajan.Google has already made the system available to a few research groups, which have released short papers describing their use of it. The teams that tried it are enthusiastic about its potential, and these examples suggest the AI co-scientist will be helpful for synthesising findings. However, it is debatable whether the examples support the claim that the AI can generate novel hypotheses.For instance, Google says one team used the system to find new ways of potentially treating liver fibrosis. However, the drugs proposed by the AI have previously been studied for this purpose. The drugs identified are all well established to be antifibrotic, says Steven OReilly at UK biotech company Alcyomics. There is nothing new here. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterWhile this potential use of the treatments isnt new, team member Gary Peltz at Stanford University School of Medicine in California says two out of three drugs selected by the AI co-scientist showed promise in tests on human liver organoids, whereas neither of the two he personally selected did despite there being more evidence to support his choices. Peltz says Google gave him a small amount of funding to cover the costs of the tests.In another paper, Jos Penads at Imperial College London and his colleagues describe how the co-scientist proposed a hypothesis matching an unpublished discovery. He and his team study mobile genetic elements bits of DNA that can move between bacteria by various means. Some mobile genetic elements hijack bacteriophage viruses. These viruses consist of a shell containing DNA plus a tail that binds to specific bacteria and injects the DNA into it. So, if an element can get into the shell of a phage virus, it gets a free ride to another bacterium.One kind of mobile genetic element make its own shells. This type is particularly widespread, which puzzled Penads and his team, because any one kind of phage virus can infect only a narrow range of bacteria. The answer, they recently discovered, is that these shells can hook up with the tails of different phages, allowing the mobile element to get into a wide range of bacteria.While that finding was still unpublished, the team asked the AI co-scientist to explain the puzzle and its number one suggestion was stealing the tails of different phages.We were shocked, says Penads. I sent an email to Google saying, you have access to my computer. Is that right? Because otherwise I cant believe what Im reading here.However, the team did publish a paper in 2023 which was fed to the system about how this family of mobile genetic elements steals bacteriophage tails to spread in nature. At the time, the researchers thought the elements were limited to acquiring tails from phages infecting the same cell. Only later did they discover the elements can pick up tails floating around outside cells, too.So one explanation for how the AI co-scientist came up with the right answer is that it missed the apparent limitation that stopped the humans getting it.What is clear is that it was fed everything it needed to find the answer, rather than coming up with an entirely new idea. Everything was already published, but in different bits, says Penads. The system was able to put everything together.The team tried other AI systems already on the market, none of which came up with the answer, he says. In fact, some didnt manage it even when fed the paper describing the answer. The system suggests things that you never thought about, says Penads, who hasnt received any funding from Google. I think it will be game-changing.Whether it really is game-changing will become clearer over time. Googles track record when it comes to claims about AI tools to help scientists is mixed. Its AlphaFold system is living up to the hype, winning the team behind it a Nobel prize last year.In 2023, however, the company announced thataround 40 new materials had been synthesised with the help of its GNoME AI. Yet, according to a 2024 analysis by Robert Palgrave at University College London, not one of the synthesised materials was actually new.Despite his findings, Palgrave thinks AI can help scientists. In general, I think AI has a huge amount to contribute to science if it is implemented in collaboration with experts in the respective fields, he says.Topics:Google