On 29 January, an American Airlines flight collided with an army helicopter near Washington DCJabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesSafety concerns about flying in the US have risen after a series of plane accidents and collisions in recent months, which were followed shortly by the administration of President Donald Trump eliminating hundreds of jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Aviation safety experts and former FAA employees say flights are safe now, but point out warning signs that would suggest a drop in safety.The FAA, which is responsible for aviation regulation in the US, has

Vaccinating animals on poultry and dairy farms could help contain the bird flu outbreakIuliia Zavalishina/AlamyAs farmers across the US struggle to contain a deadly bird flu virus, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is considering adding animal vaccines to its strategy for controlling the outbreak.Until now, vaccination was largely off the table given some countries restrict trade on inoculated birds. This includes Canada, one of the largest importers of US poultry products. The concern is that vaccinated flocks can harbour residual amounts of the virus,

If the 20th century was the age of atomics, then the 21st is the age of the internetDKosig/Getty ImagesIf you cast your mind back over the past two and a half decades, a bizarre fact emerges: everyone from business investors to teachers has been planning for a future ruled by communications technology. If the 20th century was the age of atomics, then the 21st is the age of the internet.Combining the power of radio, video and telephones, the internet is like a super-communication machine that completely upended our notion of what tomorrow would bring. Now, it seems

A coots nest filled with plastic rubbish in AmsterdamAUKE-FLORIAN HIEMSTRACovid-19 face masks, a chocolate wrapper from 1994 and a 30-year-old polystyrene burger box the nests of Amsterdams Eurasian coots chart changes to consumer society through plastic waste.Usually, Eurasian coots (Fulica atra) build their waterside nests from scratch each year using natural, biodegradable materials like rushes, reeds and leaves. But in Amsterdams busy city centre, such materials are in short supply along the riverbanks. Instead, these coots rely on plastic litter to build their nests, says Auke-Florian Hiemstra at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden,

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 A sensitive topicFeedback reads a lot of academic articles, and we are often distressed by their titles, which can be not so much meandering and unclear as digressive and circumlocutory. The only things worse are the ones that preface the academese with an allegedly humorous pop culture reference.However, sometimes we run across research whose title is brisk and to the point. We are fond of the 2000 structural biology paper The ribosome is a ribozyme, which is an absolute model of efficiency (assuming you know what the two nouns mean). And then there is a February paper on bioRxiv brought to our attention by New Scientist contributor Chris Simms, titled The coarse mental map of the breast is anchored on the nipple.AdvertisementThat may, perhaps, need a bit of context. Some parts of the human body are more sensitive to touch than others. The face especially the lips and the tips of our fingers are highly sensitive, while our backs are much less so.This is one of those classic experiments you can do at home. Get a chopstick or some other blunt tool and gently poke a willing partner. You will find that they can tell if you move the location of successive pokes, even by mere millimetres, if you poke them on the lips or fingertips. But if you poke them on the back, they will be terrible at determining whether you moved it. This is because your back has fewer touch-sensitive nerves there.The authors of this new preprint spotted a gap in the literature. While tactile acuity has been extensively studied on the limbs and face, acuity on the torso has received far less experimental attention with the breast being largely ignored, they write.Lets not drag out the suspense. It turns out breasts have very low tactile acuity, even worse than backs. Apparently, touches needed to be between 3 and 4 times as far apart on the breast than on the hand to yield equivalent location discrimination performance.Feedback isnt sure if this is quite what Caroline Criado Perez had in mind when she wrote Invisible Women, documenting the myriad ways women have been excluded from scientific research. But, as a piece of basic information, it seems like it might have its uses.Feedbacks main takeaway is that we would like to have been a fly on the wall for the recruitment process. You want to do what to my what with what?An even longer wordBack in early November 2024, Feedback was running a bit short of material due to a brief hiatus (long since over) in global idiocy, so we padded the column with a torrent of increasingly long words or, as we said at the time, we engaged in sesquipedalianism.Except it turns out we did it wrong. Francis Wenban-Smith wrote in to point out our mistake: you were 2 letters short in your attempt to pad out your column with floccinaucinihipilification. The correct word is: floccinaucinihilipilification.If you cant see the difference between those two blizzards of letters and we wouldnt blame you, because we evidently couldnt the second has an extra li just before the pili. Feedback would like to assure readers we have been given a stern talking-to.In the process of confirming that we had indeed misspelled floccinaucinihilipilification, Feedback entered the two versions into a popular search engine. The correct version brought up a dictionary entry as the highlighted response. The incorrect version brought up our article (how embarrassing), above which was an AI summary of the fake word. Here are the opening lines:Floccinaucinihipilification is a long word that means to regard something as worthless or trivial. It was the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1982. Floccinaucinihipilification is a 29-letter word with 12 syllables. It contains nine is but no es.Readers who can count to 29, unlike the AI, will notice that all those claims about the number of letters and syllables are wrong, bar the one about the letter e. Feedback is proud to have contributed, in our own small way, to the ongoing pollution of the information ecosystem.Unsafe datingLike so much else in life, dating is becoming micro-targeted. You can still use huge apps like Tinder, but there is also a growing proliferation of ever-more-niche dating sites.Perhaps the nichest of all is Unjected, aimed at those not vaccinated against covid-19. Or, to be more precise: While we do not support vaccination of any kind, Unjected is specifically tailored for Covid-19 unvaccinated or any mRNA based injection.As technology analyst Benedict Evans put it on Threads: Someone built a whole company around the Darwin Awards.Feedback has a lot of questions about Unjected, the most pressing of which is: how does the company decide who can join? Perhaps this is so basic it doesnt need saying, but you cant prove a negative.Scouring the sites FAQs, we found the answer: Since the beginning, Unjected has believed the healthiest realtionships [sic] have a foundation of trust, and we have operated on an honor system. However, for our members who want the most safety and security in choosing their future partner, we recommend our Unjected Verified upgrade. Unjected verified members attest to their unvaccination by affidavit. Love, like SARS-CoV-2, is in the air.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.

An image of the quasar 3C 186, taken by the Hubble Space TelescopeNASAs Goddard Space Flight CenterA rare collision between two supermassive black holes (SMBH) appears to have sent the resulting merger speeding through the universe, making it one of the fastest-moving black holes we have ever seen.Astronomers have long puzzled over how the gargantuan black holes at the centres of galaxies can grow to be so large. One possible route is for smaller but still extremely massive black holes to merge together, but there has been little direct evidence of this happening.

There is a new application for laserslaboratory/AlamyLasers could become an important tool for detecting radioactive materials, such as those in covert nuclear weapons, from a greater distance than ever before.Conventional radioactivity sensing techniques involve waiting for particles produced during radioactive decay to hit a detector. The method can sense these particles from tens of metres away but not much further. Howard Milchberg at the University of Maryland and his colleagues have now shown that a laser-based method could be effective from as far

MindIt is impossible for us to know exactly how another person's experience of the world compares to our own, but a new experiment is helping to reveal that colour is indeed a shared phenomenon 6 March 2025 What does red look like?Image Professionals GmbH / AlamyDoes everyone experience colour in the same way? A new investigation into this long-standing philosophical question has provided the strongest evidence yet that people with typical colour vision do indeed share the same subjective experiences of colour.Putting our subjective conscious experiences into words is notoriously challenging, making it hard to directly compare how our reality lines up to someone elses, but researchers have previously tried various tricks to get around this.One technique,

HealthMotherdom is the latest book to lay bare the shaky science pressuring parents to perfectly steer their children's development from birth. It's a welcome reality check, finds Penny Sarchet 5 March 2025 How mothers handle their babys every moveisnow subject toexpert adviceSvetikd/Getty ImagesMotherdomAlex Bollen (Verso (UK, out now; US, pending))Relax, but be on constant alert. Enjoy your baby, but take them very seriously. Follow your instincts, but do exactly what the scientists and health professionals say. Amid such a deluge of expert advice, is it any wonder that the experience of modern parenting motherhood, in particular can often feel exhausting and impossible?Thankfully, a handful of well-researched books are questioning this stress-generating situation and, in the case of Motherdom: Breaking free from bad science

Sea ice on the Arctic OceanShutterstock / Kevin XuThere was less sea ice covering the oceans in February of this year than at any other point on record, according to satellite measurements from the European Unions climate service Copernicus.One of the consequences of a warmer world is melting sea ice, and the record or near-record low sea ice cover at both poles has pushed global sea ice cover to an all-time minimum, said Samantha Burgess at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in a statement. Global average temperatures in February of this year rose 1.59C above the pre-industrial average, making it the third-warmest February on record, according to the service. AdvertisementThese high temperatures impacted the global sea ice extent, which includes both the Arctic, where sea ice is currently near its annual maximum, and the Antarctic. The satellite record for both regions extends back to 1979.In the Arctic, sea ice remained at 8 per cent below average throughout February, missing an area of ice roughly the size of the UK. This was the third consecutive month to set a new monthly record low in the Arctic.This decline in the northern hemisphere has combined with a longer-term decline in Antarctic sea ice, seen over the past two years. Although Antarctic sea ice seemed to recover to near average levels in December of last year, it then rapidly declined again. In February, the ice reached its fourth-lowest extent on record for the month, remaining 26 per cent below average.Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterThe record low ice in both hemispheres is cause for serious concern, said Robert Larter at the British Antarctic Survey in a statement. He says the lack of ice will harm polar ecosystems and expose ice shelves to more ocean water, which could accelerate melting and sea level rise.The missing ice also has an effect beyond the poles: less ice means less solar radiation will be reflected to space, adding to warming. It also could weaken global ocean currents that depend on the dense, salty water produced when sea ice forms.Topics:

In a curved space-time like the one were in, the entropy of a quantum object depends on how youre travelling when you measure itRostislav Zatonskiy/AlamyOur two best theories of the physics of the universe quantum mechanics and general relativity often fail to agree. Physicists have been trying to unite them for over a century, and now, researchers have found one place where they dont seem to clash. Working out from this one example may open the doors for building a more general, universe-wide theory.It

Light micrograph of a cervical smear, or pap smear, from someone with bacterial vaginosisDR. Y. BOUSSOUGAN/CNRI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYWomen with bacterial vaginosis, a recurrent condition that raises the risk of pregnancy complications, could benefit from their male sexual partners being treated with antibiotics, according to a trial that found this nearly halved the risk of symptoms returning.Treating male partners made the most significant inroad into improving recurrence rates in women that we have seen for decades, says Catriona Bradshaw at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who led the work. AdvertisementBacterial vaginosis (BV) affects around a quarter of women of reproductive age worldwide. It occurs when harmful bacteria overgrow in the vagina, causing vaginal discharge to turn greyish-white and smell fishy, with potentially serious complications. It increases a womans risk of acquiring a broad range of sexually transmitted infections, like HIV, and complications in pregnancy, such as premature birth and miscarriage, says Bradshaw.Doctors usually treat the condition using antibiotics in the form of pills or a cream that can be applied inside the vagina, but symptoms often recur because having sex seems to reintroduce problematic bacteria, says Bradshaw. One in two women will get their BV back within three to six months of the recommended treatment regimen, says Bradshaw.To address this, Bradshaw and her colleagues recruited 137 monogamous women in Australia with bacterial vaginosis, along with their male partners. All of the women took standard antibiotics for a week, while around half of their partners were given oral antibiotics and told to apply an antibiotic cream to the penis over the same period. The remaining men received no treatment. None of the participants was transgender.Get the most essential health and fitness news in your inbox every Saturday.Sign up to newsletterThree months later, 63 per cent of the women whose partners werent treated had recurring symptoms, while just 35 per cent of the women with partners who received antibiotics experienced a recurrence. Its definitely a sizable effect that makes it a worthwhile intervention for this group of women, says Janneke van de Wijgert at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.I see a ton of women that have issues with ongoing BV and, absolutely, Ill be applying this new information to my own clinical practice, says Christina Muzny at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.The team didnt track all the participants over the long term, but some got back in touch years later to say they remained free of symptoms. In the last week, Ive talked to someone whos been clear of BV for two years since they participated and these women were highly recurrent before the trial, says Lenka Vodstrcil at Monash University.However, the approach wont work for women with casual sexual partners, where it may be difficult to get them to adhere to taking antibiotics, says van de Wijgert. Even in monogamous relationships, men may not always be willing to take antibiotics, she says. Weve seen this with condom use, which also reduces BV recurrence it can be really difficult for women to get their male partners to use condoms.Journal reference:The New England Journal of Medicine DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2405404Topics:

Leader and HealthA rise in cancers among younger people, particularly colorectal cancer, is prompting speculation on social media over the causes. Only slow, careful research can get to the truth 5 March 2025 Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo LibraryCareless pork costs lives, wrote The Sun newspaper, a British tabloid, in a headline about the bowel cancer risks associated with eating bacon sandwiches. That scaremongering story was published almost a decade ago, but spurious claims about lifestyle choices and cancer especially bowel cancer, also known as colorectal cancer are still rife. The big difference? The alarmist claims are largely playing out on social media and are increasingly targeted at the young.Why is this? In recent years it has become clear that rates of various cancers are rising in younger people. This is raising questions and speculation

An artists impression of the norovirusScience Photo Library/AlamyAn early trial of a norovirus vaccine pill has shown promise at protecting against the notorious winter vomiting bug, with researchers saying it could potentially be available for use in a few years.The virus is highly contagious, infecting the stomach and intestines and causing vomiting and diarrhoea. Most people recover within a few days, but very young and older people are especially at risk of ending up in hospital, with significant healthcare costs. Just in the US alone, its a 10 billion-[dollar]-a-year problem, says Sean Tucker at biotech company Vaxart in San Francisco, California. AdvertisementThis has spurred scientists to develop a vaccine, but so far, efforts have failed. That is partly because prior attempts have focused on developing injectable vaccines, which are less good at generating protective antibodies in the intestine, where the virus replicates, says Tucker.To address this, Tucker and his colleagues previously developed an oral norovirus vaccine that delivers a protein from the GI.1 norovirus variant into the intestine. An initial trial in adults under 50 found that the pill could generate norovirus-specific antibodies in their guts, but people in this age group probably wouldnt be a priority for a vaccine given that they generally recover from the virus easily.Now, the researchers have tested the vaccine in people in the US aged between 55 and 80. The team gave 11 of them the pill while 22 others took a placebo. About a month later, the researchers collected blood and saliva samples from the participants.Get the most essential health and fitness news in your inbox every Saturday.Sign up to newsletterThey found the people who took the vaccine had higher levels of IgA antibodies, which can block norovirus from entering cells. These antibodies had increased by more than 10 times in their blood and around seven times in their saliva, compared with samples taken just before vaccination. In contrast, the placebo group saw little change in antibody levels.Importantly, the antibodies were still present six months later in the people who took the pill, albeit at lower levels, suggesting it could offer lasting immunity. The fact that theyve got this robust antibody response makes me hopeful that it could provide protection [against infection], says Sarah Caddy at Cornell University in New York. In particular, the saliva antibody response is a way we can get a snapshot of whats happening in the intestine because the immune responses there are similar, she says.But further work should explore whether the vaccine actually prevents infection or reduces the spread of norovirus, she says. The team hopes to explore this.Whats more, the study focused on just one norovirus variant. In the real world, there are dozens of different strains you might encounter the vaccine may not protect against them all, says Caddy. In unpublished work, the researchers found that a version of the vaccine containing both GI.1 and GII.4 norovirus variants the latter of which is currently surging in the UK generated antibodies against multiple variants, says Tucker.This suggests we might soon have a norovirus vaccine, says Tucker. If everything went smoothly, with no funding hiccups, a vaccine might be available in a couple of years, he says.Journal reference:Science Translational Medicine DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.ads0556Topics:infectious diseases

TechnologySoftware used by banks and the space industry may still rely on archaic code. We went in search of the oldest code in use and asked, what happens when it glitches? 5 March 2025 Shutterstock/SkillUpEarlier this year, the technology world welcomed back a long-lost friend. ELIZA, the worlds first artificial intelligence chatbot, had wowed the computer scientists of the mid-1960s with its ability to engage in seemingly meaningful conversation. But, for decades, ELIZA was considered lost because its creator Joseph Weizenbaum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology never published the 420 lines of code he used to create it.At that time, it was actually kind of not normal to publish code, says Jeffrey Shrager at Stanford University in California. Weizenbaum might even have thought that nobody would find it particularly interesting.How times have changed: Shrager and his colleagues are so fascinated by Weizenbaums achievement that they founded the ELIZA Archaeology Project and began digging into the history of the ancient chatbot. A few years ago, their efforts were rewarded when they discovered the missing code in a box of Weizenbaums old documents at MIT, paving the way for ELIZAs recent resurrection.It is astonishing that we can once again talk to a chatbot that occupies such an important place in the history of AI. It got me wondering: is the ELIZA code the oldest out there, or are there even older snippets of computer code still performing impressive or important tasks? My journey in search of the oldest code took me into the heart of modern operating systems and, figuratively at least, beyond the outer reaches of the solar system. And it revealed something unexpected: this old code, far from being revered like ELIZAs, evokes strangely contradictory attitudes among

Bones that appear to have been fashioned into tools date back 1.5 million yearsCSICAncient humans were regularly making tools out of animal bones 1.5 million years ago more than a million years earlier than previously thought. This indicates that they could adapt the techniques they used to make stone tools to repurpose bone, a very different material.It also raises the question of why there is no record of people consistently making bone tools for another million years. Have examples in that gap not been preserved or discovered, or did people abandon them in favour of something better?

Light has been made into a strange material called a supersolidBaac3nes/Getty ImagesAn odd solid that can flow like a fluid has been created from light for the first time. Studying it will help researchers better understand exotic quantum states of matter.We actually made light into a solid. Thats pretty awesome, says Dimitris Trypogeorgos at the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy. He notes Daniele Sanvitto, also at CNR, showed how light could become a fluid more than a decade ago. Now Trypogeorgos, Sanvitto and their colleagues have used light to make not just any solid, but a quantum supersolid. AdvertisementSupersolids simultaneously have zero viscosity and a crystal-like structure akin to the arrangement of atoms in salt crystals. These strange materials have no counterpart outside of the quantum realm. Because of this, they have previously only been created in experiments with atoms cooled to extremely low temperatures, where otherwise negligible quantum effects become dominant.But in this experiment, the researchers replaced ultracold atoms with the semiconductor aluminium gallium arsenide and a laser.They shone the laser onto a small piece of the semiconductor that had a pattern of narrow ridges. Complex interactions between the light and the material eventually formed a type of hybrid particle called a polariton. The ridge pattern constrained how these quasiparticles could move and what energies they could have in such a way that the polaritons formed a supersolid.Sanvitto says the team had to very precisely measure enough properties of this trapped and transformed light to prove it was both a solid and a fluid with no viscosity. This was a challenge because scientists had never created and experimentally evaluated a supersolid made from light before, he says.The new experiment contributes to physicists general understanding of how quantum matter can change its state by going through a phase transition, says Alberto Bramati at Sorbonne University in France. The team clearly demonstrated they made a supersolid, but many more measurements need to be done to understand its properties, he says.Trypogeorgos says light-based supersolids may be easier to manipulate than those previously created with atoms, which could make his teams experiment a first step towards understanding a slew of novel and surprising types of matter.We are really at the beginning of something new, he says.Journal referenceNature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08616-9Topics:

A visualisation of the Radcliffe wave, a series of dust and gas clouds (marked here in red) across the Milky Way. It is about 400 light years from our sun, marked in yellowAlyssa A. Goodman/Harvard UniversityOur solar system passed through a vast wave of gas and dust around 14 million years ago, dimming Earths view of the night sky. The wave may even have left traces in our planets geological record.Astronomers have previously discovered large ocean-like waves of stars, gas and dust in the Milky Way that undulate up and down over millions of years. One of the closest and best-studied of these is the Radcliffe wave, which is nearly 9000 light years in width and sits only about 400 light years from our solar system. AdvertisementNow, Efrem Maconi at the University of Vienna and his colleagues have found that the Radcliffe wave used to be much closer to us, crossing our solar system between 11 million and 18 million years ago.Maconi and his team used data from the Gaia space telescope, which has tracked billions of stars in the Milky Way, to identify recently formed groups of stars within the Radcliffe wave, along with the dust and gas clouds from which they formed.Using these stars to indicate how the wave as a whole is moving, they tracked the orbits of the clouds back in time to reveal their historic location. They also calculated the past path of the solar system, winding the clock back 30 million years, and found that the wave and our sun made a close approach between around 15 million and 12 million years ago. Estimating exactly when the crossing began and ended is difficult, but the team thinks the solar system was within the wave around 14 million years ago.Untangle the weirdness of reality with our subscriber-only, monthly newsletter.Sign up to newsletterThis would have made Earths galactic environment darker than it appears today, as we currently live in a relatively empty region of space. If we are in a denser region of the interstellar medium, that would mean that the light coming from the stars to you would be dimmed, says Maconi. Its like being in a foggy day.The encounter may also have left evidence in Earths geological record, depositing radioactive isotopes in the crust, though this would be hard to measure given how long ago it happened, he says. Explaining Earths geological record is an ongoing problem, so finding galactic encounters like these is useful, says Ralph Schoenrich at University College London.More speculatively, the crossing appears to have happened during a period when Earth was cooling called the Middle Miocene. It is possible the two are linked, says Maconi, although this would be difficult to prove. Schoenrich thinks it is unlikely. A rule of thumb is that geology trumps any cosmic influence, he says. If you shift continents or interrupt ocean currents, you get climate shifts from that, so Im very sceptical you need anything in addition.Journal reference:Astronomy & Astrophysics DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202452061Topics:

Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto made key breakthroughs in reinforcement learningDawn Gaves, University of Alberta/Zinj Guo, University of Massachusetts AmherstAndrew Barto and Richard Sutton have won the 2024 Turing award, which is often called the Nobel prize of computing, for their fundamental work on ideas in machine learning that later proved crucial to the success of artificial intelligence models such as Google DeepMinds AlphaGo.Barto, who is now retired and lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, didnt even realise he was nominated for the award. I joined a Zoom with some people and was told and I was

Male chimpanzees sometimes make sexual contact in stressful timesJake Brooker/ Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage TrustSome chimpanzees seem to use sexual behaviour like genital rubbing to manage stressful situations, which shows they arent as different from hypersexual bonobos our other closest living ape relatives or, indeed, people as we thought.Jake Brooker at Durham University, UK, and his colleagues have investigated the sexual behaviour of non-human primates at the Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia. Both sanctuaries include a mix of wild and captive-born apes that can roam and forage freely within them. AdvertisementThe researchers observed 53 bonobos (Pan paniscus) across three groups at Lola ya Bonobo and 75 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) across two groups at Chimfunshi in the course of feeding events that involved a swing distributing a limited supply of peanuts over a particular area.Bonobos and chimpanzees both live in very complex social structures with very rich social interactions that they have to navigate on a daily basis, says team member Zanna Clay, also at Durham University. Anticipating such feeding events can be stressful because of competition over who gets to the food first.The researchers observed 107 instances of genital contact in the bonobos and 201 in the chimpanzees in the 5 minutes before 45 feeding events across the five groups.The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterThis is either putting a hand or foot onto another primates anogenital region and it also might involve the genitals touching each other, like the genital rubbing behaviour that bonobos are very famous for, says Brooker.The study also revealed differences between the species: We found the frequency of sex in these situations was more common in female bonobos with other females, whereas it was more common among males in chimps, says Clay. That may be linked to the fact that bonobos live in matriarchal groups, while chimpanzees live in patriarchal ones, she says.Using sex as a social tool to navigate all sorts of social problems has given bonobos a bit of a reputation as a sort of sexy, hippie ape, says Clay. This work shows us that the differences between the two species are maybe not as big as was previously assumed. Chimpanzees, although theyre known to be aggressive and violent, actually have a really rich repertoire of behaviours that they use to manage their social lives.Chimps have definitely drawn the PR short straw by comparison to bonobos, says Matilda Brindle at the University of Oxford.The chimps use sex in a way that goes beyond reproduction and although it is different from sexuality in humans, we also dont just have sex for reproduction, says Clay. For instance, stress reduction has been given as a reason people have sex.Kit Opie at the University of Bristol, UK, wonders whether the same level of behaviour would be seen in wild settings rather than sanctuaries.The work may also shed light on our last common ancestor, which lived some 5 million to 7 million years ago, before humans diverged from chimps and bonobos, he says.Given that all three species use sexual behaviours to navigate social relationships, the common ancestor we share likely did too, says Brindle.Journal reference:Royal Society Open Science DOI: 10.1098/rsos.242031Topics:Monkeys and apes

Under tech billionaire Elon Musk, the DOGE task force has slashed jobs across the US governmentAFP via Getty ImagesThe US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an independent task force, has shut down 18F, a group of in-house tech experts focused on improving efficiency in the US government. 18F consulted with other government agencies about adopting cost-effective technologies and built digital services for tasks including applying for passports and filing taxes online.Initiatives like 18F and the US Digital Service (USDS), another government unit of tech consultants, created a rich professional network of doers, fixers and dreamers who could modernise government services, says Daniel Castro at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank based in Washington DC. AdvertisementHe says the recent abrupt elimination of 18F could potentially stall US government projects and he expressed scepticism that DOGE is the appropriate organisation to replace USDS or 18F in helping the US government make efficient use of technology. I wouldnt hire a demolition crew to build a skyscraper, says Castro.The US government typically spends more than $100 billion on IT services each year, but these expensive tech investments often fail to actually work as promised, according to the US Government Accountability Office. 18F helped avoid such waste by consulting with federal and state government agencies on which tech solutions to adopt, and determining which companies could provide them on time and within budget, says Dan Hon, an expert on government digital services and technology.Three former 18F employees, who requested anonymity, described their recently cut work to New Scientist. One helped digitise a healthcare application system to make it easier for states to access federal Medicaid funds these provide health coverage for 70 million Americans, including 40 per cent of all children and 60 per cent of all nursing home residents.Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox.Sign up to newsletterAnother former employee worked with the US Department of the Interior on an interactive website that tracks environmental damage from the release of oil or other hazardous substances. Such data helped ensure the companies responsible for the damage, rather than taxpayers, would pay to clean it up, they said.18F members had also been updating the National Weather Services forecast website to make it more user-friendly. The 18F team worked with the USDS to develop the free Direct File program, which allows people in participating states to file their taxes directly to the Internal Revenue Service instead of having to purchase tax preparation software or hire accountants. The government estimates more than 30 million taxpayers in 25 states are eligible for the service in 2025.Now the future of these projects is uncertain. Since President Donald Trump began his second term in January 2025, he has renamed and remade the USDS as DOGE, which is nominally led by government official Amy Gleason but has in effect been commandeered by tech billionaire Elon Musk. Many former US Digital Service members have since been fired or resigned.Musk took aim at 18F early on in Trumps second administration, but former 18F employees did not receive an official reduction in force notice shutting down their organisation until 28 February. About 85 members of 18F were directly affected by the layoffs, with another three having taken an earlier buyout offer.The elimination of 18F and a combination of layoffs and resignations from the former USDS team means there is no organisation left with a government-wide mission to develop and build technology, say former 18F employees. A spokesperson for the General Service Administration (GSA), a US government organisation that provides operational support to all federal agencies, says, GSA will continue to support the Administrations drive to embrace best-in-class technologies to accelerate digital transformation and modernise IT infrastructure.Topics:

PhysicsWe can describe the quantum realm using straightforward mathematics but once we try to translate these ideas into the real world, things get weird. Our quantum columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan explains why 4 March 2025 Why is the quantum realm so weird?jvphoto/AlamyThe following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter. Each month, we hand over the keyboard to a physicist or mathematician to tell you about fascinating ideas from their corner of the universe. You cansign up for Lost in Space-Time here.Before I entered university, I learned quantum physics is the most mysterious type of physics, full of particles that exist in two places at once, waves that dont actually wave and objects whose behaviour can depend on things happening on the other side of our universe. I

A Greenland shark photographed near the seabeddotted zebra/AlamyA genomic study may have revealed how Greenland sharks live for centuries and yet rarely get cancer.These sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) are slow-moving dwellers of the deep that can reach more than 6 metres long and weigh over a tonne. We know little about their lives because they roam in dark, cold waters, but it is thought they dont reach sexual maturity until they are 150 years old and their lifespan has been estimated at about 400 years, making them the longest-living vertebrates that we know of.

Alamy/Ryan WillsImagine looking out over a beautiful vista. The sun glances off the snowy peaks of distant mountains, a river winds through rolling hills. There is something wonderful about beholding the contours of a majestic landscape.It might not be obvious when you look at the night sky, but the universe has a landscape of its own filaments of galaxies separated by near-empty voids. We have long known this much. But now one group of cosmologists is taking things further and proposing that the universe possesses not just a landscape, but a timescape, too. The idea is that the very flow of time varies from place to place.To say this goes against the grain would be an understatement: we have always thought that on large scales, time runs at the same speed throughout the universe. But in this picture known as timescape cosmology there are large patches of the universe where time has been ticking for billions of years longer than we usually assume.It may sound strange, but what entices some physicists is the simple elegance of this idea. There is no freaky physics involved, it springs naturally from established theory. It is part of the structure of general relativity, says its inventor David Wiltshire at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Its just not a part of the

Should we add fungus to cows meals?Volodymyr TVERDOKHLIB/ShutterstockA species of fungus found in soil can be fed to cows to cut down on the potent greenhouse gas methane in their burps.Its a fungal soup, says Matthew Callaghan at Roam Agricultural, a startup in Australia aiming to grow large amounts of the fungus in bioreactors. Instead of feeding cows the fungi directly, however, the company plans to extract the methane-reducing compound they make called bromoform and add it to feed

Mice that have been modified to give them a mammoth-like coatColossalThere are an estimated 1.5 million genetic differences between woolly mammoths and Asian elephants. Colossal Biosciences, the company aiming to resurrect the extinct species through genetic engineering, has now made mice with mammoth-like fur, each with up to five genetic changes. There is, it seems, still a way to go.True, the fur of these mice is long, curly and blondish. In that way, it does resemble the coats of woolly mammoths preserved in permafrost. However, it isnt clear that making the same genetic changes to Asian elephants which have far fewer hairs per area of skin would have similar results. AdvertisementThe work done on these mice does not mean that there is a ready solution to bring back a mammoth phenotype, says team member Love Daln at Stockholm University in Sweden, who is on Colossals scientific advisory board. As you point out, we also need to figure out how to make the fur grow more.Creating Asian elephants with these genetic changes will also be much harder than doing it in mice. Engineering mutations in mice is a well-established process and not particularly challenging, says Dusko Ilic at Kings College London.A modified and unmodified mouseColossalTechniques that work in mice often fail in other species, and the size of elephants and their slower reproduction will vastly increase the time and costs involved. Those methods have not been developed for elephants and it wont be easy just based on the anatomy, says Vincent Lynch at the University at Buffalo, New York. That is probably the biggest challenge.But Lynch has no doubt it is achievable. Indeed, Thomas Hildebrandt at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany another Colossal advisor told New Scientist that his team has collected eggs from elephants for the first time, though the results havent yet been published. Egg collection is a key step in IVF and the genetic modification of mammals.So how did Colossal make its mammoth mice? The researchers began by looking for known mutations in mice that make their fur look mammoth-like. [T]he majority of these genes were selected based on previous observations of coat phenotypes in mice, they write in a paper released today, which hasnt been peer-reviewed.They identified eight genes that affect the pattern (curliness), colour and length of hair when disabled in mice. Of these eight, one was naturally disabled in mammoths, according to Colossal.From the mammoth genome, the team also identified a small mutation thought to affect hair pattern, along with another disabled gene involved in fat metabolism.The company then tried altering these genes in mice. For instance, in one experiment, it tried using CRISPR gene editing to disable five of these genes in fertilised eggs. From 134 edited eggs, 11 pups were born and in one of these pups, both copies of the five genes were disabled.Preserved fur on a frozen mammoth trunkAlamy Stock PhotoIn another study, the researchers used a form of CRISPR called base editing to disable several of the genes in embryonic mice stem cells. They combined this with another technique called homologous recombination to make the exact mutation found in the mammoth genome. Making precise changes is much harder than disabling genes but the recombination method only works well in mice.The team then sequenced the cells to identify ones with the desired changes and injected them into mice embryos to create chimeric mice. Of 90 embryos injected, seven mice with the four intended changes were born.These experiments can be said to be successful in terms of producing some mice with the desired physical changes to their fur, but only one of the genetic changes exactly matches what is seen in the mammoth genome. A lot more work is needed to achieve Colossals stated aim of creating a cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological traits of the woolly mammoth and with elephant pregnancies lasting around two years, Colossal is running out of time to meet its self-imposed 2028 deadline.An elephant with a fur will not be a mammoth in the way we think of it, says Juan Antonio Rodrguez at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Many of the 1.5 million differences between the genomes of mammoths and Asian elephants may have no effect, he says, but we dont know for sure which ones do matter.Even if we did, making more extensive changes is risky, says Rodrguez. The more things you change in an organism, the more likely it is that you end up messing up with key metabolic pathways or genes.Rodrguez, Lynch and Ilic are all against bringing back the mammoth. Lynch reels off a long list of reasons why he thinks it is a bad idea, from the mammoths habitat no longer existing to the ethical aspects of trying to genetically modify elephants even in humans, for instance, collecting eggs for IVF remains a risky and painful procedure.Mammoths are extinct and cannot be de-extincted or resurrected, says Lynch. All they can do is make an elephant look like a mammoth.Topics:genetics

Concepts from cryptography can be applied to speeding up algorithmsImago/AlamyAdding a dash of encryption to key algorithms used in artificial intelligence models could surprisingly make them more efficient, thanks to a trick of mathematics.Cryptography normally involves scrambling messages to make them appear random to malicious onlookers while preserving their information by hiding a pattern in the randomness. This randomness can then be unlocked with the correct key.Now, Or Zamir at Tel Aviv University in Israel and Vinod Vaikuntanathan at the Massachusetts Institute of

DARPA envisions growing structures hundreds of metres longScience Photo Library / Alamy Stock PhotoThe US military is brainstorming ways to build large structures in space, from telescope antennas to elevator tethers. By growing these objects in microgravity using biological organisms, they hope to avoid the costly and painstaking process of launching components from Earth.We have yet to unlock the potential of biology for space production and manufacturing, says Michael Nayak, program manager for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The combination of biology and mechanical engineering could unlock new ways to manufacture at unprecedented

The moon has turned to cheese in John Scalzis new sci-fi novelMadeleine Steinbach / Alamy Stock PhotoMy only complaint about the science fiction due to be published in March is: how in the world are we meant to find the time to read all these great novels? There are so many must-reads out this month, whether its the latest from Nicholas Binge, Silvia Parks tale of a lost robot sibling or Laila Lalamis vision of a future where our dreams are policed for what we might be going to do (sounds quite Minority Report a very good thing in my view). All I can say is, I think its time to step away from the computer and get reading, if we want to keep upWhen the Moon Hits Your Eye by John ScalziSadly for humanity, in this latest slice of comic sci-fi from the excellent John Scalzi, the moon has turned to cheese and they have to work out what to do about it. This sounds like a lot of fun, but Im primarily planning to read it to find out what type of cheese the moon has become. Im hoping its a nice gooey chunk of taleggioDissolution by Nicholas BingeOur sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson heartily approves of Binges latest, writing that this time travel tale is well-deserving of its upcoming big-screen treatment. It tells the story of Maggie, the carer for her husband Stanley, who is losing his memory. But then a mysterious stranger, Hassan, turns up and tells her that it isnt that Stanley is losing his memories, but that someone is taking them and Maggie can go into his mind and get them back. Ive not read any Binge yet, but I am keen to try out this one and his previous novel, Ascension.AdvertisementNicholas Binges new time travel novel Dissolution is being adapted into a filmShutterstock / New AfricaLuminous by Silvia ParkI have heard a lot about this debut novel and it is sitting in my vast pile of books, ready to be picked up when I get a second. It sounds wonderful. In a future unified Korea, three estranged siblings (two human, one robot) reunite after 11-year-old Ruijie discovers the body of a robot boy in a junkyard.The Dream Hotel by Laila LalamiThis speculative mystery sounds just my kind of disturbing. Sara is on her way home from a work trip when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration grab her at the airport. Theyve used data from her dreams and discovered she is at imminent risk of harming her husband. She must therefore be remanded to a detention centre, for his safety, for 21 days. But once there, alongside the other dangerous dreamers, she finds it might be harder to get out than she thoughtJoin us in reading and discussing the best new science and science fiction booksSign up to newsletterThe Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip FracassiI am a huge fan of a previous Fracassi novel, A Child Alone With Strangers which is like Stephen King at his scary-but-warm-hearted best. So I was delighted to learn that he has turned to sci-fi with this time travel novel, in which the titular third rule is that the traveller is unable to interact with the past, only observe it. But then scientist Beth Darlow, who builds the machine that enables this trip to the past to happen, discovers that even her observations are causing her timeline to warp. I am really looking forward to this one.Rose/House by Arkady MartineThe Hugo-winning Martine wrote a stunning sci-fi short story for New Scientist a few years back. Shes brilliant! And to top that off, her latest is being compared to the best scary novel ever written: Shirley Jacksons The Haunting of Hill House. In Martines twist, a house (Rose House) infused with an artificial intelligence has been locked up since the death of its architect. The only person allowed to visit is the architects protg, once a year. But now there is a dead person there and Rose House isnt communicating any further. Creepy!A Thousand Blues by Cheon Seon-ran (translated by Chi-Young Kim)Winner of the 4th Korea Sci-fi Literature Award, this novel is set in 2035, when two sisters learn their beloved racehorse is being sent to the knackers yard and hatch a plan to save her. They will get her to run one last race to remind her of happier times, but will train her to run the slowest race of her life.A new colony is being established on Mars in Mary Robinette Kowals latest novelShutterstock / GorodenkoffThe Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette KowalThis is the fourth in Kowals Lady Astronaut series and is set years after an extinction-level global warming event on Earth, triggered by a meteorite strike. The survivors are now out to establish a new home on Mars and Elma York, the Lady Astronaut, arrives on the Red Planet to prepare. But something seems offSpace Brooms! by A. G. RodriguezThis comic homage to all things sci-fi follows Johnny Gomez, the custodian or space broom of a far-flung space station, who discovers a stolen data chip and sets out to make his fortune. Im never quite sure about so-called comic novels (the only ones I have ever genuinely roared with laughter at are Andy Stantons Mr Gum series, which I really recommend if you have a child in primary school), but this does sound fun.A Palace Near the Wind by Ai JiangThis is described as science-fantasy it follows Liu Lufeng, a princess of the Feng royal family, who have bark faces, branch arms and needle hair. She is due to be the next bride of a human king, but her people, who live within nature, are under constant threat from human expansion. Lufeng decides she will kill the king on her wedding day and put an end to future marriages for her people.Who Wants to Live Forever by Hanna Thomas UoseYuki and Sam are soulmates, but when Sam decides to take a new miracle drug that can extend a humans lifespan indefinitely, what will happen to their romance?The Sea Eternal by Emery RobinThis is the sequel to Robins The Stars Undying and sees Anita on a quest for revenge after the death of Commander Matheus Ceirran. When she travels into a neighbouring empire, however, she discovers a secret that could threaten the galaxy.Topics:

PtShortly after my 54th birthday, I received a package. The enclosed instructions told me that next time I emptied my bowels, I should scrape a bit of the stool into a small sample bottle, seal it in a pre-paid envelope and drop it into the post. I did the deed and, a few weeks later, was invited to hospital. My sample contained blood; a colonoscopy was ordered to rule out colorectal cancer.I dont, thankfully, have colorectal cancer, and a colonoscopy at 54 is a classic initiation into middle age. But in the coming years, this particular rite of passage might start happening much earlier. While rates of this cancer among people in my age group have been declining thanks to screening programmes like these, the story for the under-50s is far more troubling.From being virtually unheard of in the 20th century, early-onset colorectal cancer (EOCRC), as it is called in people under 50, now accounts for around 10 per cent of all new cases worldwide. That number is predicted to more than double by 2030, and by then, EOCRC is expected to be the most common form of fatal cancer in Americans aged 20 to 49.The reason why is uncertain, but an ambitious new project is exploring potential causes as well as the idea that EOCRC may be a distinct and more aggressive form of the disease. Meanwhile, as routine screening is extended to younger groups in January, England lowered its screening age to 50 and new, less-invasive tests