Donald Trump holding an executive order announcing the US withdrawal from the Paris AgreementJIM WATSON/AFP/Getty ImagesA cheer went up from the crowd in a Washington DC stadium on 20 January as US president Donald Trump signed an order on stage to withdraw the US from the Paris climate treaty. The order said the move was in the interest of putting America first. But environmental groups condemned the decision, arguing the exit of the worlds second-largest greenhouse gas emitter from the agreement will exacerbate climate damages while ceding US influence in global negotiations to its rival and clean-energy juggernaut, China.This is a matter of the US and the Trump administration shooting themselves in the foot, says David Waskow at the World Resources Institute, a global environmental nonprofit. It will sideline the US.AdvertisementThis is the second time Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, the landmark deal agreed upon in 2015 to limit global warming to well below 2C above the pre-industrial average. Due to the rules of the United Nations treaty, the first exit in 2017 took three years to become official, and the US only left for a few months before the former US president Joe Biden had the country rejoin in 2021.This time around, the rules of the accord stipulate it will take a year for the withdrawal to become official, at which point the US will be the only major economy not party to the agreement. The other countries that have not signed on are Libya, Yemen and Iran.This is definitely not good news for international climate action, says Li Shuo at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington DC. Unlike the first time the US withdrew, this second exit comes at a moment when the countrys appetite for ambitious emission reductions was already facing geopolitical, social and economic obstacles, he says. Last year saw record global emissions while the rise in global average temperatures surpassed 1.5C for the first time. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterThe US exit will leave the country without leverage to push for deeper emission cuts, and could create an excuse for countries around the globe to decrease their own climate commitments. Climate momentum across the world, even before Trumps election, was declining, says Li.However, the US withdrawal wont mean the bottom drops out of global climate action, says Waskow. Countries representing more than 90 per cent of global emissions are still committed to the Paris agreement. Wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, batteries and other clean technologies also now play a much larger role in the global economy than the first time the US withdrew, he says.The rest of the world is shifting to clean energy, says Manish Bapna at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a US environmental advocacy group. This will slow that transition, not stop it. But it raises the question of what role the US will play in shaping that future, he says.Looming large is China, which dominates many of the key clean energy industries, from solar panels to batteries, and is increasingly exporting its technology to the rest of the world. The US wont only be ceding influence over how those markets are shaped, but will be ceding those markets period, says Waskow. I dont think other countries will think of the US first when thinking about who to engage with.The retreat from global climate action also comes as the new Trump administration moved swiftly to reverse, abandon or impede the previous administrations policies in a flurry of executive orders made in the first day in office. Those include a ban on federal permits for wind energy, and a rollback of policies Biden put in place to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles. Others are aimed at expanding fossil fuel development on federal lands, in coastal waters and in Alaska and increasing exports of natural gas to solve what yet another order declares is a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill, he said in his inaugural address.Topics:

Strategic napping canaid recovery from sleep deprivationJean Gaumy/Magnum PhotosSleep researchers dedicate their careers to understanding how and why we sleep so what do they do to get a better nights rest?It might be reassuring to know that even the experts arent always able to practise what they preach. I think youll find a lot of sleep researchers are not very good at sleeping, says Malcolm von Schantz at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.This article is part of special series investigating key questions about sleep. Read more here.But one thing many of them agree on is that consistency is crucial. Heres what else they had to say:MAKE A PLANIt is about prioritisation and planning. So I try not to have meetings before 10 oclock, for example, because I am more of an evening type: I quite like to go to bed late and wake up late. So Im thinking ahead in terms of whats best for me with my sleep timing, my circadian timing, how can I try and arrange my schedule to support that?Steven Lockley, TimeshifterCONTROL YOUR LIGHTINGWe dim our lights in our house pretty much when the sun sets, and then, in the mornings, turn the lights on inside as much as possible and certainly open up the window shades to get the sunlight in the house as soon as the sun is coming up. I think those are really important things: minimise light at night, maximise light in the morning.Christopher Depner, University of UtahKEEP COOLSleep science has shown that your body [temperature] should drop a full degree

A ridge in south-east Sicily that was eroded by the megafloodKevin Sciberras and Neil PetroniJumbled deposits of rock found on the top of hills in south-east Sicily were left by the megaflood that refilled the Mediterranean sea 5 million years the largest known flooding event in Earths history.The rock deposits and eroded hills in this part of Sicily, a region of Italy, are the first land-based evidence found for the megaflood, says Paul Carling at the University of Southampton in the UK. You can actually walk around and see it, says Carling. AdvertisementAround 6 million years ago, during the so-called Messinian salinity crisis, the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic Ocean and began to dry out. Vast deposits of salt formed at this time and the sea level may have dropped by a kilometre or more.Water once again started flowing through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean around 5.3 million years ago. Researchers initially thought an enormous waterfall near Gibraltar refilled it over a period of tens of thousands of years.But in 2009, the discovery of a massive eroded channel on the bottom of the strait pointed to a much more abrupt megaflood. The evidence for this has been growing ever since. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterThis megaflood first filled up the western basin of the Mediterranean Sea, says Carling. Eroded features on the seafloor suggest it then spilled over the underwater ridge, known as the Sicilian sill, into the eastern basin.Team member Giovanni Barreca at the University of Catania in Italy, who grew up in south-east Sicily, suspected the land there was also shaped by the megaflood. So he and his fellow researchers took a closer look and analysed rock samples.Sure enough, they found the jumbled deposits near the top of some hills contain rocks that have been eroded from much deeper layers and somehow carried up to the top of the hill. You can tell from their nature that they were from these lower levels, says Carling. And they were carried up and over these hills.Many of the hills themselves have a streamlined shape, and resemble ones in Montana that were sculpted by a massive flood caused by an ice dam breaking at the end of the last glacial period. Theyre quite distinctive, says Carling. And the only thing can streamline features of this scale is very large-scale, deep flooding.More Sicilian ridges shaped by the megafloodDaniel Garcia CastellanosThe team estimated during the peak of the flood the water was flowing at around 115 kilometres per hour and covered the tops of the hills which are around 100 metres above the modern-day sea level with about 40 metres of water.The researchers also studied the seafloor around Sicily and found yet more evidence for the megaflood, such as eroded ridges and channels. Their modelling suggested the entire Mediterranean Sea refilled in between two and 16 years, but the main flooding event in Sicily probably lasted only days, Carling says.Journal reference:Communications Earth & Environment DOI: 10.1038/s43247-024-01972-wTopics:

Public health programmes around the world could be cut due to the US leaving the WHOJohn Moore/ Getty ImagesIn one of his first executive orders as president, Donald Trump has begun the process of withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization (WHO). One years notice is required to retreat from the international public health body, at which time the US will stop contributing funds. The impact could be huge. In recent years the US has contributed nearly a fifth of the WHOs $6.8 billion budget.In a statement released with the order, the

Artists visualisation of the gas giant planet WASP-127bESO/L. CaladaA vast alien planet has blistering winds racing around its equator at nearly 30 times the speed of sound on Earth.Lisa Nortmann at the University of Gttingen, Germany, and her colleagues used the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe WASP-127b, a giant gas exoplanet more than 500 light years from Earth. It is slightly larger than Jupiter but is one of the least dense planets we know of. AdvertisementThe team expected to see a light signal from the planets atmosphere that had one distinct peak, but instead found two separate peaks.I was a little bit confused, says Nortmann. But with a little bit more careful data analysis, it became clearer that there are two signals. I was quite excited my first thought was immediately that it has to be some sort of super-rotating wind.The researchers concluded that the two peaks came from rapid winds in a jet stream around the planets equator, with half the wind moving towards Earth and the other half moving away from it. The wind, which appears to be made up of water and carbon monoxide, seems to be moving at 33,000 kilometres per hour, making it the fastest wind ever measured on a planet. Voyage across the galaxy and beyond with our space newsletter every month.Sign up to newsletterWere talking about 9 kilometres per second. The wind speed on even Jupiter is like a few hundred metres per second, so this is really an order of magnitude larger, says Vivien Parmentier at the University of Oxford.You wouldnt be able to feel these extreme speeds if you were in this wind, because it would be moving around you at the same speed, he says. But you would experience temperature differences of hundreds of degrees over a matter of hours, as the winds moved from the hot side of the planet, which is permanently facing its star, to its cold side, which sits in constant darkness.The researchers dont know why WASP-127b has such extreme winds, but Nortmann says the planet has certain special properties, such as its low density and its wonky orbit around its star, that could play a role. However, no clear connection has been established between those facts and the particularly strong winds.Journal reference:Astronomy & Astrophysics DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202450438Topics:exoplanets

Starship flight test 7 goes through rapid unscheduled disassemblyJames Temple PhotographyThese eerie images of a fiery sky show the moment when SpaceXs Starship rocket dramatically returned to Earth in pieces last week. They were captured by photographer James Temple, who was working as a chef on a superyacht in the Turks and Caicos Islands. When he realised what was happening, he grabbed his camera extender for a closer shot.Starships seventh flight test took off from SpaceXs site at Boca Chica, Texas, on 16 January, but SpaceX lost contact with the rocket after approximately eight and

Trying to sleep your way through jet lag might not actually workIakovos Hatzistavrou/AFP Via Getty ImagesIn the first flush of our relationship, my husband began taking a series of photos of me during our travels. In every one, I am asleep: sat on a chair at the Muse dOrsay in Paris. Head on my chest in the back seat of a car in Kiev, Ukraine. On a train in France, mouth open, drooling. He is lucky I still married him.This article is part of special series investigating key questions about sleep. Read more here.Jet lag certainly isnt pretty. Other than leaving you feeling exhausted or wide awake at the wrong time of day, a long flight across time zones can also cause gastrointestinal distress, off-kilter body temperature, headaches, irritability and cognitive impairment, all of which are much more serious for people who fly all the time, such as airline pilots. What can we do?Many of us approach jet lag by prioritising sleep whenever we can, in order to counter the exhaustion. Even the National Health Service website for England recommends that you change your sleep schedule to the new time zone as quickly as possible, and many of us try to just knock ourselves out on overnight flights (often with the help of over-the-counter medicines or in-flight refreshments).While this approach isnt always wrong, it can sometimes do more harm than good. Instead, we need to think about jet lag in a more nuanced way, says Steven Lockley, a neuroscientist who was at Harvard University Medical School. Jet lag really is

PhysicsPhysicists have created a 3D shape called the cosmohedron, which can be used to reconstruct the quantum wavefunction of the universe - and potentially do away with the idea of space-time as the underlying fabric of the universe 21 January 2025 Is space-time the fabric of the universe, or is there something deeper?Shutterstock/Mohd. AfuzaWhat is the structure of our physical reality? Physicists have long imagined space and time interweaving into space-time, the metaphorical fabric that underlies the cosmos. But there may be something even more fundamental. Instead of space-times three spatial dimensions and one of time, the physics of our world could be encoded into a set of odd geometrical shapes and studying them may chart a new, space-time-free path towards a theory of everything.The idea is that space-time somehow has to go, that it has to

Paul Briginshaw/Millennium Images, UKWhats the difference between your time spent in bed and your bank balance? No, this isnt the start of a terrible joke and the answer is less than you might think.We all have the odd occasion when we stay up too late and dont sleep enough. Think of this as the equivalent of splurging on an expensive dinner: you probably shouldnt have, but your bank balance hopefully wont suffer too much.This article is part of special series investigating key questions about sleep. Read more here.But regularly going without enough sleep a problem for many people, with the US Centers for Disease Control reporting that a third of adults there get less than 7 hours a night could have you racking up a sleep debt, with real consequences for physical and mental health (see Why your chronotype is key to figuring out how much sleep you need). Like paying back a financial debt, catching up on sleep takes planning.Part of the problem is that we might not know how much sleep debt we have accrued and how badly it is affecting us. In one study, for instance, participants were randomly selected to get 4, 6 or 8 hours per night for 14 days straight. By the end, those getting 6 hours or less exhibited a cognitive deficit equal to missing up to two entire nights of sleep. However, despite feeling worse after a couple of days, from then on the restricted sleepers didnt necessarily notice their cognitive abilities continuing to decline. The tired brain cant detect how tired it is, says Russell Foster, a

Wheat is harvested from strips lined by vertical solar panels at the Next2Sun solar park in GermanyKnoblauch GmbH/Next2SunRapid reductions in the price of solar panels mean they are starting to appear in unexpected places, from balconies to motorway embankments. Now, researchers say they could play the role of hedgerows in farm fields, with double-facing solar panels generating power while acting as windbreaks for crops and livestock.Farmers are already installing solar panels, often positioning tilted arrays over crops or allowing sheep to graze between panels. But such installations, known as agrovoltaics, can lead to excessive shading of

Images of the two peculiar icy objects captured by the ALMA radio telescopeTakashi Shimonishi/Niigata UniversityTwo strange, icy objects in our galaxy that look unlike anything astronomers have ever seen could be an entirely new kind of star.In 2021, Takashi Shimonishi at Niigata University in Japan and his colleagues spotted what appeared to be two icy balls of gas in roughly the same patch of sky, but separated by a large enough distance to be unrelated to each other.The objects properties were baffling. They looked like

All the planets will appear to line up across the sky towards the end of Februaryalxpin/Getty ImagesAll of our solar systems planets are lining up to parade through the night sky at once. This extraordinary celestial event will see the sky scattered with seven visible planets in what is known as a great planetary alignment.The eight planets in our solar system orbit the sun in roughly the same plane, because they all originally formed from the same disc of debris around the sun. The line the sun traces across the daytime sky, called the ecliptic, aligns with this plane, so when the planets appear in the sky, they all appear roughly along the ecliptic. It isnt a perfect line of planets, because their orbits are tilted slightly, but it is fairly close. AdvertisementNever is this more apparent than during a planetary alignment. An alignment including all of the planets except Mercury is taking place in mid-January. Uranus and Neptune, being the most distant planets, will only be visible through a telescope, but you may be able to spot the others with the naked eye.The great alignment, including Mercury, will only happen for a few evenings around 28 February, depending on your location. All seven planets will be visible briefly right after sunset, stretching in an arc across the sky.By the time the sky is completely dark, Mercury and Saturn will have sunk below the horizon, with Neptune and Venus following shortly after. The best time to spot the planets will be in the hour after sunset, when all of them except Mars, Jupiter and Uranus will be close to the horizon. Those three will continue to hang around for most of the night, but spotting three planets in the sky isnt nearly as rare as finding all seven. Voyage across the galaxy and beyond with our space newsletter every month.Sign up to newsletterThe main thing preventing such alignments from being visible all of the time aside from weather is the difference in orbital periods between the planets. Mercury, which is closest to the sun, takes about 88 Earth days to complete an orbit, while Neptune, which is most distant, takes nearly 165 Earth years.A great alignment is only possible when the planets are all relatively far from the sun, so they are visible at night, and all in roughly the same half of the sky, so they can be seen at the same time. It is a remarkable orbital coincidence sometimes there are multiple great alignments in a year, and sometimes several years pass without a single one.In some ways, a planetary alignment is simply an optical illusion: the planets are still separated by millions or billions of kilometres, and if you could look down on our solar system from outside of it, you would never see them arrayed in a perfect line emanating from the sun. But for stargazers around the world, its an excellent chance to see all of the planets at once, neatly arrayed across the sky.Topics:

HealthResearch is revealing the complex relationship between sleep and the gut microbiome, raising the prospect that eating better during the day might help you get a better nights rest 20 January 2025 Foxys_forest_manufacture/Getty ImagesThere are many things we can blame for a bad nights sleep screen time, stress, too much booze. Now there is another culprit: the microbes in our gut.This article is part of special series investigating key questions about sleep. Read more here.We have long known that our microbiome has a powerful influence on our health, and new research is revealing that this extends to our sleep, too. But it is a complex, two-way relationship. The microbiome is influencing sleep, and sleep is influencing the microbiome, says Elizabeth Holzhausen at the University of Colorado Boulder. The good news is that there are ways we can intervene.At first glance, the link between your stomach and sleeping patterns might not be obvious, but a growing number of studies are shedding light on the impact they have on each other. For instance, a 2023 study of 720 people found that diversity of microbes in the gut was associated with better sleep. Likewise, a look at nearly 1000 people by researchers at Kings College London (KCL) and other institutions, in association with the personalised nutrition company Zoe, found that irregular sleep patterns were linked to a boost in the number of unfavourable bacterial species associated with poorer health outcomes.Whats more, changes in the composition of the gut microbiome are associated with several sleep conditions. Rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder, for instance, which causes sleepers to physically act out their dreams during REM sleep, is linked to a depletion of gut bacteria that produce the short-chain fatty acid butyrate and a rise in bacteria that increase inflammation.

HealthThe benefits of taking GLP-1 agonists seem to outweigh the risks, at least when taken for approved uses, according to an assessment of how the drugs affect 175 conditions 20 January 2025 Semaglutide and other GLP-1 agonists are injectedIuliia Burmistrova/Getty ImagesDrugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, called GLP-1 agonists, carry more benefits than risks when taken for their approved uses, according to a comprehensive analysis of their effects on 175 conditions. The same may not be true for people taking the drugs for other uses, however.In this new land of GLP-1, we wanted to really map the benefits and risks for all conditions that might be plausibly linked, says Ziyad Al-Aly at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. AdvertisementThe drugs are best known for helping people control type 2 diabetes and treat obesity. They mimic a hormone in the body, GLP-1, that lowers blood sugar levels and makes people feel fuller for longer.Dozens of studies suggest GLP-1 agonists may also cut the risk of a slew of other conditions, from heart disease to dementia to substance use disorders. These studies have involved hundreds or thousands of people and focused on just one or a few conditions at a time, but millions of people are now using the drugs, meaning we can investigate less frequent effects, says Al-Aly.To gain a more comprehensive picture, he and his colleagues examined the health records of more than 200,000 people with diabetes who took GLP-1 agonists in addition to their standard treatment over a four-year period. They also looked at 1.2 million people with diabetes who only received standard care across the same period, and assessed the risks of both groups developing 175 different health conditions. Get the most essential health and fitness news in your inbox every Saturday.Sign up to newsletterThe team found that those who took GLP-1 agonists had a lower risk of 42 conditions. For instance, their risk of heart attacks was reduced by 9 per cent and their risk of dementia dropped by 8 per cent. The odds of this group having suicidal thoughts or substance use disorders, including addiction to alcohol and opioids, also decreased by around a tenth even when the team accounted for factors that could affect the results, such as participants age, sex and income levels.There were downsides for the people taking GLP-1 drugs, however. They were more likely to experience known side effects including nausea and vomiting, along with others not described before. These include a 15 per cent higher risk of kidney stones and more than double the risk of an inflamed pancreas, or drug-induced pancreatitis. In total, risks were higher for 19 conditions, while for most of the conditions assessed, including bronchitis, rheumatoid arthritis and obsessive-compulsive disorder, taking GLP-1 drugs had no meaningful impact on risk levels.The fact that these drugs do affect such a wide range of conditions is still surprising, although exactly why they have this impact is unclear. Theyre reducing obesity, which is sort of the mother of all ills you treat it and subsequently get benefit in the heart, the kidney, the brain and everywhere else, says Al-Aly. They also generally dampen organ-damaging inflammation and seem to target parts of the brain related to addiction, he says.One issue with the analysis is that the team didnt report the actual number of people affected by each condition, making it hard to interpret the results, says Daniel Drucker at the University of Toronto, who has worked with obesity-drug companies. While the risk reductions in common conditions like heart attacks and dementia are probably worth taking seriously, he says, the links to rarer conditions like pancreatitis might involve a very small number of cases and so pose little risk to most people. Al-Aly says the team will be presenting specific case numbers in a future study.Overall, the research provides reassurance that the benefits of GLP-1 agonists outweigh the risks, at least for people with type 2 diabetes and obesity. There are no red flags for this group, says Stefan Trapp at University College London, who has also worked with an obesity-drug firm.But for those without these conditions, such as people without obesity buying the drugs to lose weight, the picture may differ. We have no idea if the benefits will outweigh the risks, says Drucker.Journal reference:Nature Medicine DOI: 10.1038/s41591-024-03412-w Topics:

A virtual drone was piloted through an obstacle course by a person imagining moving their fingersWillsey et al.A man with paralysis who had electrodes implanted in his brain can pilot a virtual drone through an obstacle course simply by imagining moving his fingers. His brain signals are interpreted by an AI model and then used to control a simulated drone.Brain-computer interface (BCI) research has made huge strides in recent years, allowing people with paralysis to precisely control a mouse cursor and dictate speech to computers by imagining writing words with a pen. But so far, they havent yet shown great promise in complex applications with multiple inputs. AdvertisementNow, Matthew Willsey at the University of Michigan and his colleagues have created an algorithm that allows a user to trigger four discrete signals by imagining moving their fingers and thumb.The anonymous man who tried the technology has tetraplegia due to a spinal cord injury. He had already been fitted with a BCI from Blackrock Neurotech made up of 192 electrodes, implanted in the area of the brain that controls hand motion.An AI model was used to map the complex neural signals received by the electrodes to the users thoughts. The participant learned how to think of the first two fingers of one hand moving, creating an electrical signal that can be made stronger or weaker. Another signal was generated by the second two fingers and another two by the thumb. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterThese were sufficient to allow the user to control a virtual drone by thought alone, and with practice he could skilfully pilot it through an obstacle course. Willsey says the experiment could have been done using a real drone, but was kept virtual for ease and safety.The goal of doing the quadcopter was really kind of shared between our lab and the participant, says Willsey. For him, it was the realisation of kind of a dream that he thought was lost once he suffered his injury. He had a passion and a dream for flying. He seemed very empowered and enabled; he would have us take videos and send it to friends.Although the results are impressive, there is still much to be done before BCIs can be reliably used for complex tasks, says Willsey. Firstly, AI is needed to interpret signals from the electrodes, and this relies on individual training for every user. Secondly, this training needs to be repeated over time as functionality declines, which may be due to electrodes shifting slightly in the brain or changes in the brain itself.Journal reference:Nature Medicine DOI: 10.1038/s41591-024-03341-8Topics:brain

Our guts are home to trillions of bacteriaARTUR PLAWGO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYAnalysing ones stools was once a niche interest. A quick look at Amazon, however, reveals dozens of home tests designed to test the composition of your faeces. You can even buy kits for your pets.Such products reflect a surge in public appetite for information about the gut microbiome. Regardless of the country you are in, a lot of patients are coming to physicians asking about microbiota testing, says Gianluca Ianiro at the Catholic University of Rome.

Bismuth crystals reflect light in all colours of the rainbowOliver Berg/dpa/AlamyUltra-thin flakes of bismuth display mysterious magnetic properties which could help the soft, iridescent metal become a wonder material for making greener electronics.Frankly, Im still waking up at night because I wonder: what is at play here? says Guillaume Gervais at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.Researchers have suspected that very thin flakes of bismuth could have unusual physical properties, as other ultra-thin materials like carbon-based graphene do. But because bismuth is so

How can you set yourself up for exercise success in 2025?Alamy Stock PhotoWhether you are a couch potato or fitness aficionado, the start of a new year is a great time to take up an exercise goal. The challenge, of course, is seeing it through. A 2020 study of more than 1000 participants found that only about half of them successfully sustained their resolutions for a year. I, for one, have tried and failed for years to tick running a half-marathon off my bucket list. I am determined for 2025 to be different. So how do you

Iain M. Banks wrote a succession of best-selling science fiction storiesJoseph Branston/SFX Magazine/Future via Getty ImagesThe Culture seriesIain M. Banks (Orbit Books)Iain M. Banks died more than 11 years ago, but remains a titan of modern science fiction. He wrote literary works under the name Iain Banks, but added the M for his 14 sci-fi offerings, which are known for an audacious, ground-breaking take on the space opera that transformed the genre.If you have never read any of these books but love hard sci-fi, is it worth diving in now?Short answer: yes. Longer answer:

Smoke rises during a fire at Vistra Energys Moss Landing battery storage facility in California on 17 JanuaryBloomberg / Getty ImagesA fire at the worlds largest battery storage plant in California destroyed 300 megawatts of energy storage, forced 1200 area residents to evacuate and released smoke plumes that could pose a health threat to humans and wildlife. The incident knocked out 2 per cent of Californias energy storage capacity, which the state relies on as part of its transition to use more renewable power and less fossil fuels.The fire started the afternoon of 16 January, burning through a concrete building full of lithium batteries at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in Monterey county, California. Other buildings on the site, including more battery storage facilities and a natural gas plant, were not affected. By the morning of 17 January, local officials reported minimal flames and smoke. AdvertisementThis is really a lot more than a fire, its a wake-up call for this industry, said Glenn Church, a member of Monterey countys board of supervisors, during a press conference. If were going to be moving forward with sustainable energy, we need a safe battery system in place. After the press conference on the morning of 17 January, the blaze flared up again that afternoon, leading to an extension of the evacuation order.Because lithium fires burn at high temperatures and emit toxic substances such as hydrogen fluoride, firefighters let this type of blaze burn itself out rather than engaging with it directly. There have been no reports of injuries associated with the fire, and air monitor systems did not detect any signs of hydrogen fluoride. But the smoke plumes from the fire are likely to have contained heavy metals and PFAS, better known as forever chemicals, says Dustin Mulvaney at San Jose State University in California.Local officials are currently advising residents of Monterey county to stay indoors and keep their doors and windows closed. Inhaled heavy metals and PFAS could pose a health risk to area residents and farm workers. These substances could also impact wildlife such as the sea otters that live in the wetlands of the nearby Elkhorn Slough salt marsh, says Mulvaney. Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox.Sign up to newsletterThe destroyed building was one of two Moss Landing battery facilities owned by the Texas-based company Vistra Energy. Its facilities previously experienced less serious incidents that involved overheating batteries and malfunctions in the fire suppression system. But the facility that went up in flames this week has a water-based suppression system and it is unclear why it failed, said Vistra Energy officials during the press conference. They are still investigating the root cause of the fire.Despite this incident, utility-scale battery systems for electricity grids have experienced a 97 per cent drop in failures worldwide which are often fire-related between 2018 and 2023, according to a report by the Electric Power Research Institute, a non-profit organisation based in Washington DC.This massivedecrease has been observed in spite of the fact that deployments of utility-scale storage continue to increase at high rates, says Maria Chavez at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Battery storage systems are designed with multiple levels of safety features that aim to prevent and mitigate issues like fire risk unfortunately, accidents like the one at Moss Landing facility can still occur.California is also better prepared than most US states to respond to such incidents: it has a state law requiring local governments to develop emergency response plans with battery developers, says Mulvaney. He described the need to learn from events like this in designing future battery storage systems.But the loss of most or all of the 300-megawatt facility at Moss Landing will put a serious dent in Vistra Energys overall 750-megawatt on-site energy storage capacity, and Californias total 13,300-megawatt energy storage capacity.Moss Landing has been serving the states electricity grid by storing renewable energy and reducing dependence on fossil fuels such as natural gas plants, says Mulvaney. Reconstruction and building back battery capacity could take several years a big ask, considering California is already facing the need for extensive rebuilding elsewhere due to the Los Angeles wildfires.We cant have battery fires like this, says Mulvaney. We cant lose 300 megawatts of batteries overnight like this.Topics:

Joseph Weizenbaum created the ELIZA chatbot at MITFrom the image archive of the documentary film Weizenbaum. Rebel at WorkA groundbreaking chatbot created in the 1960s has been painstakingly reconstructed from archived records and run for the first time in over half a century, as part of an effort to preserve one of the earliest examples of artificial intelligence.ELIZA was written by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in just 420 lines of code. The AI model is extremely rudimentary compared with todays large language models (LLMs) like the one behind ChatGPT, but

A tiny drone powered by soft muscle-like actuatorsKevin ChenAn insect-inspired robot that only weighs as much as a raisin can perform acrobatics and fly for much longer than any previous insect-sized drone without falling apart.For tiny flying robots to make nimble manoeuvres, they need to be lightweight and agile but also capable of withstanding large forces. Such forces mean that most tiny robots can only fly for around 20 seconds before breaking, which makes it difficult to collect enough data to properly calibrate and test the robots flying abilities. AdvertisementNow, Suhan Kim at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have developed an insect-like flying robot about the size of a postage stamp that can execute acrobatic manoeuvres, such as double flips or tracing an infinity sign, and also hover in the air for up to 15 minutes without failing.Kim and his team adapted the design from a previous flying robot, but they made the joints more resilient by having them connect across a larger part of the robot than at just a single failure point. This reduced the force through the joints by a factor of around 100, says Kim. They also used muscle-like soft actuators to move the wings, rather than standard electric motors. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterIf you only have 20 seconds to fly the robot before it dies, then theres not so much we can tune when we control the robot, says Kim. By having a hugely increased lifetime, we were able to work on the controller parts so that the robot can achieve precise trajectory tracking, plus aggressive manoeuvres like somersaults.This tracking meant that the robot could follow complex flight paths, like tracing letters in the air. Such manoeuvrability could eventually be used for things like artificially pollinating plants or inspecting parts of aircraft that people cant get to, says Kim.However, the robot is currently unable to fly untethered, as the team have yet to miniaturise a power source and the electronics that control it though they hope to improve this with future designs, says Kim.One aspect that often doesnt get talked much about is how long the robot would last when you fly it, says Raphael Zufferey at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who wasnt involved in the work. People have focused a lot on battery life and how autonomous we could make it, but no one really focused too much on how long it would mechanically last, and this paper really goes into that in detail.Journal reference:Science Robotics DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adp4256 Topics:robots

Flooding in Atlanta, Georgia, in September 2024S LESSER/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockIn 2024, Earth received about 2.9 millimetres of rain per day. That may not sound like much, but it could represent a new record amount of precipitation for the planet.Last years global average precipitation was about 3 per cent greater than the average since records began in 1983, and it just surpasses the previous record, set in 1998. The 2.9-millimetre number, based on preliminary data compiled by researchers at the Global Precipitation Climatology Project, may still change slightly as the data is finalised. But if it holds, it

A protester holds a pro-TikTok sign in front of the US Supreme Court on 10 January 2025Allison Robbert/The Washington Post/Getty ImagesThe US Supreme Court has upheld a ban on the popular video streaming app TikTok, which is set to take effect on 19 January.The ban will require US firms to block users from accessing or updating TikTok through app stores or internet browsers unless ByteDance, the apps Chinese parent company, sells it to a US company by the 19 January deadline. AdvertisementTikToks challenge to the law, which the Supreme Court began hearing on 10 January, argued that it violates the US Constitutions protection of free speech. On the same day, the court heard arguments in a related case: a legal counsel representing TikTok content creators argued that a ban also infringes on those individuals constitutional rights.But the US solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, argued that the ban on TikTok is about preventing foreign espionage as opposed to clamping down on free speech. The US governments case is that the Chinese government could use TikTok to collect sensitive personal data on hundreds of millions of people in the US that could be later used against them.The Supreme Court unanimously agreed with the governments argument, ruling against TikTok and individual creators in both cases. There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community. But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikToks data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary, the opinion states. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterTikTok will shut down the app for US users on the same day the ban goes into effect, 19 January, according to Reuters. But this may not be the last twist in the legal drama.US President Joe Biden will leave office on 20 January, the day after the ban kicks in. An official in his administration has stated that Biden wont enforce the law, according to AP News. Instead, the strength of the ban depends on the actions of President-Elect Donald Trumps upcoming administration.Trump initially supported a TikTok ban during his first term as president, but has since changed his stance, expressing support for allowing the platform to continue US operations. After he takes office on 20 January, he could ask law-makers to repeal or amend the law or instruct the government to not enforce it.Topics:

An ion trap can control atoms for quantum experimentsY. Colombe/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYAfter decades of looking, researchers have seen a string of atoms go through a 1D phase change so elusive that it could only happen inside a quantum simulator.One motivation [for our experiment] is really trying to understand fundamental physics. Were trying to understand just the basic states that matter can be in, says Alexander Schuckert at the University of Maryland. AdvertisementHe and his colleagues used electromagnetic fields to arrange 23 ions of the element ytterbium into a line, forming a nearly one-dimensional chain. This device can be used for quantum computing, but in this case, the researchers used the chain as a simulator instead.Within it, they built a 1D ytterbium magnet one atom at a time. Previous calculations predicted this type of magnet would become unmagnetised when warmed, thanks to quantum effects. But no past experiment had achieved this phase transition.One reason for the difficulty is that systems like quantum computers and simulators typically only work well when they are very cold. Warming them to make the phase transition occur can thus cause malfunctions, says Schuckert. Untangle the weirdness of reality with our subscriber-only, monthly newsletter.Sign up to newsletterTo avoid this, he and his colleagues tuned the initial quantum state of the atoms so that, as time went on, the 1D magnets collective state changed as if its temperature had been increased. This revealed the never-before-seen phase transition.The achievement is very exotic because chains of atoms generally shouldnt undergo phase transitions, says Mohammad Maghrebi at Michigan State University. The researchers were only able to engineer it because they could make each ion interact with others that were far from it, even though they werent touching. This pushed the whole line into an unusual collective behaviour.Because their simulator makes such exotic states of matter possible, it could be used to study theoretical systems that may be very rare or even not exist in nature, says Maghrebi.Schuckert suggests quantum simulators could also help explain odd electric or magnetic behaviours that some materials show in the real world. But to do so, these devices must be able to reach higher temperatures than they can today. They can currently model extremely cold temperatures only, but he says higher-temperature simulations may be possible within five years.And even more existing and theoretical systems could be studied if the simulators can be made larger, for example by arranging the ions into two-dimensional arrays, says Andrea Trombettoni at the University of Trieste in Italy. This will suggest new physics to explore, he says.Journal referenceNature Physics DOI: 10.1038/s41567-024-02751-2

A robotic exoskeleton can train people to move their fingers more quicklyShinichi FuruyaA robotic hand exoskeleton can help expert pianists learn to play even faster by moving their fingers for them.Robotic exoskeletons have long been used to rehabilitate people who can no longer use their hands due to an injury or medical condition, but using them to improve the abilities of able-bodied people has been less well explored. AdvertisementNow, Shinichi Furuya at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo and his colleagues have found that a robotic exoskeleton can improve the finger speed of trained pianists after a single 30-minute training session.Im a pianist, but I [injured] my hand because of overpractising, says Furuya. I was suffering from this dilemma, between overpractising and the prevention of the injury, so then I thought, I have to think about some way to improve my skills without practising. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterFuruya remembered that his teachers used to show him how to play certain pieces by placing their hands over his. I understood haptically, or more intuitively, without using any words, he says. This made him wonder whether a robot might be able to replicate this effect.The robotic exoskeleton can raise and lower each finger individually, up to four times a second, using a separate motor attached to the base of each finger.To test the device, the researchers recruited 118 expert pianists who had all played since before they had turned 8 years old and for at least 10,000 hours, and asked them to practise a piece for two weeks until they couldnt improve.Then, the pianists received a 30-minute training session with the exoskeleton, which moved the fingers of their right hand in different combinations of simple and complex patterns, either slowly or quickly, so that Furuya and his colleagues could pinpoint what movement type caused improvement.The pianists who experienced the fast and complex training could better coordinate their right hand movements and move the fingers of either hand faster, both immediately after training and a day later. This, together with evidence from brain scans, indicates that the training changed the pianists sensory cortices to better control finger movements in general, says Furuya.This is the first time Ive seen somebody use [robotic exoskeletons] to go beyond normal capabilities of dexterity, to push your learning past what you could do naturally, says Nathan Lepora at the University of Bristol, UK. Its a bit counterintuitive why it worked, because you would have thought that actually performing the movements yourself voluntarily would be the way to learn, but it seems passive movements do work.Journal reference:Science Robotics DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adn3802Topics:

MindNeurologist Adam Zeman's excellent exploration of the power and complexity of our imaginations literally needs more space to house all its riches 15 January 2025 Maarten Wouters/Getty ImagesThe Shape of Things UnseenAdam Zeman (Bloomsbury Circus)Just imagine! No, seriously, just imagine: an apple, perhaps, or a cartful of apples, or even a kingdom in which monstrous apples are fought by oranges on horseback. Our imaginations are capable of this and much more. They are responsible for films, novels and paintings, as well as buildings, computers and governments. They are unfathomably powerful.And yet the imaginings themselves are gossamer hard to hold onto, hard to pin down. I might be able to describe the apple I am thinking of, but what about the feeling I can

A world organised along very different lines to Earth Alien ClayScience Photo Library/AlamyHard science fiction exists to push the boundaries of the imagination in a very specific way: thought experiments that start with the known and the possible, then dial everything up to 11 to see what the world looks like.This works with any area of science, or indeed human life. In a way, the authoritarian excesses of the Earth-based regime known as the Mandate in my novel Alien Clay are as much a thought experiment as the bizarre life of Kiln, the planet on which the book is set. It is just that there are fewer steps between the now and the future of the book on its political side than on its biological side.Alien Clay is in conversation with scientific knowledge in two quite distinct ways. The first the most obvious is what is going on on Kiln. The scientists in the prison colony there have the unenviable task of trying to categorise and explain a world organised along very different lines to Earth.AdvertisementThat was my starting what if question. Its very easy to take a lot for granted and assume that some Earth things are universals, but our data set for life is precisely one. We know Darwinian evolution explains the interconnected variety of Earth life, but could life have gone any other way? Or is that competitive world the only possibility?In Alien Clay I hypothesise an alternative of extreme symbiosis. In fact, a lot of what goes on there is inspired by Earth life because the popular image of survival of the fittest focuses on faster, stronger, tougher, whilst life tends to be more about how well you work alongside your neighbours. Join us in reading and discussing the best new science and science fiction booksSign up to newsletterThe basic unit of life, as my protagonist Professor Arton Daghdev says, is all life, not the individual organism. On Kiln, this interreliance is taken to extremes, as each apparent organism or species is a composite of specialist parts working together, any of which parts might be found performing its trick as part of any number of separate creatures. It is evolution by Lego, fit to drive the poor Earth scientists mad. Life by committee, meaning that the individual parts of the Kiln ecosystem are pre-adapted to be adventurous in what they try to intersect with. Kilnish biochemistry is different to that of Earth, but if you want to interact on that level, it comes down to molecular shapes, locks and keys and the life of Kiln is a natural lockpicker, as the humans of the prison colony have found to their cost.The other half of the scientific conversation thats going on is the political regime that the scientists are working under, which is the reason why the madcap ecology of Kiln is considered a problem and not an opportunity to learn. The Mandate cant abide anything that doesnt fit into its worldview, and its worldview is anthropomorphic the universe has a purpose, and the purpose is us, as the motto goes.Kiln is an affront to the humanocentric science of the Mandate, especially with the maddening signs that Kilns hotchpotch evolution produced intelligent life. The point that Arton the dissident scientist makes is that, no matter their possession of the power and the guns, regimes like the Mandate always feel the need to appeal to some higher power permitting them their violence and oppression. It can be religion or it can be science, but there is just enough shame in the most brutal regime that they need to justify their excesses and cruelties. Hence, the Mandate looks to the scientists to make Kiln fit into their neat universal view, and the life of Kiln thumbs its many noses at them and refuses to oblige.Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor) is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with ushereTopics:

Climate change can increase the frequency and severity of droughtsZhang Yu/VCG via Getty ImagesSevere droughts that persist for years have grown hotter, drier and larger since the 1980s. These long-lasting droughts some of which are extreme enough to be classified as megadroughts can be especially devastating to agriculture and ecosystems.Rising temperatures linked to climate change have increased the risk of drought because warmer air can hold more moisture, boosting evaporation from the land. Combined with changing precipitation patterns that lead to less rain, this can exacerbate and lengthen periods of drought as witnessed in the recent worst-in-a-millennium megadroughts in parts of North and South America. AdvertisementDirk Karger at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research and his colleagues identified more than 13,000 droughts that lasted at least two years between 1980 and 2018 to reveal long-term trends. They found that, since the 1980s, the most severe multi-year droughts have become even drier and hotter.The droughts have also affected a larger part of the globe, with the area affected by the 500 most severe drought events each year expanding by about 50,000 square kilometres annually. Thats an area bigger than Switzerland, says Karger.Satellite images of greenness in the areas affected by drought also showed some ecosystems became browner, indicating the drier conditions were having an effect. The most dramatic shift was in temperate grasslands, which are more sensitive to changes in water availability, while tropical and boreal forests showed a smaller response. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterThe researchers did not do a formal analysis to define how much human-caused climate change has contributed to the trend, but the patterns are consistent with what researchers expect to see with rising temperatures, says Benjamin Cook at Columbia University in New York, who was not involved with the research.The work highlights how long-term drought can have consequences just as severe as climate disasters like destructive wildfires or powerful hurricanes, says Cook. For both people and ecosystems, the cumulative impact of droughts is really what matters.Journal reference:Science DOI: 10.1126/science.ado4245Topics:

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has been recording atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1958FRED ESPENAK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYThe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere measured by a weather station at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii increased by 3.58 parts per million in 2024 the biggest jump since records began there in 1958.Were still going in the wrong direction, says climate scientist Richard Betts at the Met Office, the UKs weather service. AdvertisementThe record increase is partly due to CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and other human actions, such as cutting down forests, hitting a record high in 2024. Adding to this were a large number of wildfires, fuelled by record-smashing global temperatures boosted by the El Nio weather pattern on top of the long-term warming.Betts is forecasting that atmospheric CO2 levels as measured at Mauna Loa will this year rise by 2.26 parts per million (ppm), with a margin of error of 0.56 ppm either way. Thats a lot less than the 2024 record, but it will take us above the last possible pathway for limiting the increase in global surface temperatures to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.You could regard it as another nail in the coffin of 1.5C, says Betts. Thats now vanishingly unlikely. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterThe level of CO2 in the atmosphere is the most important measure when it comes to climate change, because rising atmospheric CO2 is the main factor driving both short and long-term warming. The first ongoing measurements of CO2 levels were made at Mauna Loa.Because this station has the longest time record and is also located far away from the main anthropogenic and natural emissions and sinks of CO2, it is often used to represent global change in CO2 concentrations, says Richard Engelen at the EUs Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.With observations from satellites, however, it is now possible to directly measure the average global level of atmospheric CO2. According to CAMS, it rose by 2.9 ppm in 2024. That isnt a record, but it is one of the biggest increases since satellite observations began.The reason for this larger increase needs further investigation, but it will be a combination of rebounding of emissions in large parts of the world after the covid pandemic in combination with interannual variations in the natural carbon sink, says Engelen. The carbon sink refers to the oceans and ecosystems on land, which have been soaking up around half of the CO2 emissions caused by humans.It has long been predicted that, as the planet warms, less of this excess CO2 will be soaked up. Whether this is the start of that is the concerning thing, says Betts. We dont know.At Mauna Loa, the increase in CO2 is higher than the average global level due to the large number of wildfires in the northern hemisphere in 2024, says Betts. It takes time for plumes of CO2 from sources such as wildfires to mix evenly into the atmosphere around the world. The fire emissions in the northern hemisphere were particularly large last year, he says.Although it now looks certain that global warming will pass the 1.5C limit, Betts thinks it was still right to set that as a target. The Paris Agreement was carefully phrased to pursue effects to limit warming to 1.5. It was recognised at the outset that it would be challenging, he says. The idea was to have this stretch target to motivate action, and actually I think that was successful. It did galvanise action.Topics:climate change