Last week, my time at New Scientist came to an end. It's been a pleasure working with such a talented and dedicated team and taking on brand-new challenges over the past couple years

🔥🧵 Resignation letters from top CDC experts: "Their desire to please a political base will result in death & disability of vulnerable children & adults. Their base should be the people they serve not a political voting bloc." - @drdemetre.bsky.social Thanks for your service.

In 2020, 5% of all the calories grown on farms 🚜 went into making biofuels rather than being used as food - and that figure is likely higher now 🧪 To me, this is a crazy bad idea being enabled by government subsidies www.newscientist.com/article/2493...

Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

Asgard archaea frozen in Siberia appear to have remained alive for more than 100,000 years based on DNA analysis. Genetic overlap with other Asgards suggests astonishingly long lifespans could be common trait among the closest living relatives of all eukaryotes. Per @karenlloyd.bsky.social etal.🧪

Solar panel exports from China to Africa surged 60 per cent over the past year, says @ember-energy.org. Unlike previous jumps, this upward trend was spread across the continent – with 20 countries seeing import records and 25 countries importing more than 100 megawatts worth of panels.🔌💡

Black cars absorb much more heat from sunlight compared to reflective white cars - and can significantly increase nearby air temperature even more than dark asphalt. Notable urban heat island implications for cities with parked cars densely packed together.🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2493...

The more your exposure to heatwaves, the faster your body may age. See the growing evidence of this accelerated aging impact. Air conditioning protects but sustainable cooling needed to mitigate the climate change that makes heatwaves more frequent and severe.🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2493...

The huge volume of ore extracted from existing US mines is full of critical minerals, but nearly all of this goes to waste. New analysis finds out just out how much is getting tossed out.🧪🔌💡

Driverless taxis are on their way to London. As a cyclist, a Londoner and a journalist who's spent years covering AI’s pratfalls, I am a tad nervous. Yet, given how often I've been hit by inattentive human drivers in London, part of me is cautiously optimistic. www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

In 1989, it seemed like room-temperature nuclear fusion might be possible, solving the world's energy problems. But cold fusion, as it was known, was soon dead in the water after failed replications. Now, a new experiment has resurrected its ghost ☢️ www.newscientist.com/article/2493...

NASA and IBM released an AI model that can forecast what the sun will look like and even predict solar flares two hours in advance. It's a new tool for studying the sun, and may even enhance early warnings about space weather that could impact Earth. 🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2492...

These gorgeous origami shapes - an entirely new family called bloom patterns - could be used to design new, more effective space telescopes or solar panels. www.newscientist.com/article/2493...

Oooh, fascinating and hopeful article by @marynmck.bsky.social on what may be the end of food allergies: www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-...

"Two unrelated young people buried in cemeteries in England in the Early Middle Ages probably had grandparents from West Africa... the discovery implies that migrants in Anglo-Saxon times were coming from much further afield than previously thought." 🧪

Tiny discs that can levitate in sunlight could fly within a layer of the Earth's upper atmosphere nicknamed the "ignorosphere" - a region beyond the reach of aircraft and balloons. This goes back to a physics phenomenon first demonstrated in 1873.🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2492...

Big new modeling study finds climate change may have locked temperatures in the Pacific Ocean into a pattern could drive drought in the western US for decades. More broadly, this suggests climate models may generally underestimate how much our emissions influence longterm cycles of ocean temps.🧪

If you've ever wanted to know how best to play Guess Who? and make your chances of winning around 65% each time, then you should follow this strategy devised by mathematicians. www.newscientist.com/article/2491...

We already know that drought & rising temps are making wildfires more severe. Now researchers @exeter.ac.uk are investigating whether climate change is making trees themselves more flammable www.newscientist.com/article/2491...

Don't try this at home! Or maybe do? www.newscientist.com/article/2492...

As Europe is engulfed in yet another fierce heatwave, this summer is starting to look an awful lot like this worst-case scenario... www.newscientist.com/article/2491...

It's incredibly irritating that GLP-1 and GPT-5 are in the news at the same time

Europe's current climate could produce a 'mega heatwave', feat. more than a month of +40C temps & intense drought Extra scary fact: The worst-case heatwaves occur predominantly after another extreme heatwave. In other words, rolling waves of deadly heat www.newscientist.com/article/2491...

"The typical rug in a cleaning video looks like it has been transported down a muddy ravine, colonised by fungi and passed through the digestive system of a dyspeptic hippopotamus. In some cases maggots are involved."

The @newscientist.com Feedback columnist recently wasted a lot of time watching YouTube videos of dirty rugs being cleaned, and consequently they have some thoughts about The Algorithm. https://loom.ly/l8sme7Y

Retired coal power plants could provide backup or emergency power to the electricity grid – but this time drawing on heat energy stored in dirt instead of burning fossil fuels. More details on how this clean energy repowering option works in my article 🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2491...

A super-sticky hydrogel that works 10x better than any similar glue underwater was created after analysing 24,000 sticky protein sequences from living organisms. Great example of how the research journey can matter as much as the final result. 🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2491...

Great news www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

mRNA tech is some of the coolest, most powerful, most promising scifi shit humans are currently doing. They are being investigated to help with cancers, autoimmune diseases, M.S., stroke recovery, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and high cholesterol.

The importance of mRNA technology for medicine goes way beyond vaccines, but we won't realise its immense potential if funding is cut, as I wrote back in March 🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2473...

Earlier this year I spent a wild afternoon at a conference where people debated whether infinity exists. Looking into it later took me as far as dissident poets and the very bones of maths. My favorite longform piece yet, generously edited by @jjaron.bsky.social www.newscientist.com/article/2489...

Earthquakes fracturing rock could unlock a wide menu of chemical energy sources for microbes living deep underground. 👀 www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

The Trump administration is attempting to end the US government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by arguing they do not pose a danger to people. But climate scientists and lawyers say this argument is...um...weak.🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

More research is uncovering that aritficial sweeteners aren't as harmless as we once thought. Not only may they increase hunger and raise blood sugar, but a new study finds they could also be interfering with crucial cancer treatments. www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

Last week's Tea app leak and the UK's disastrous roll out of the Online Safety Act are an important snapshot of our near future: An internet that feels safer, but surveils our every move, supported by massive databases of our most embarrassing and sensitive data. www.garbageday.email/p/the-tea-ap...

People who consume the artificial sweetener sucralose are less likely to respond to cancer immunotherapy. The sweetener may blunt the treatment’s effects because of its impact on the gut microbiome 🧪

A stroke of lighting that lasted more than 7 seconds and flashed across 829 kilometres is officially the longest ever recorded 🧪

An 829 kilometer long lightning flash! SHOCKING. 😅⚡ www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

“This shows a linkage between animal biodiversity loss and a process that exacerbates climate change,” says Evan Fricke at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We’re losing the regrowth potential of tropical forests.” 🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

Several scholars (including me) who have been critical of Colossal Biosciences and de-extinction have been targeted by a mysterious harassment campaign www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

Wonderful work from the deepest ocean here. Life in the Hadal zone, at nearly 10km deep - sustained entirely by symbiosis! Here: siboglinids (tubeworms) and polychaete bristleworms. 1/

An iron-air "rust" battery has connected to an electricity grid for the first time. Such batteries could enable European and US power grids to store and use more renewable energy over much longer periods. 🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

Meltwater eruption in Greenland takes scientists by surprise www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

It might actually be possible to share quantum entanglement indefinitely often, like tapping into a near-infinite "entanglement bank" 🧪

A solar-powered surveillance drone with a wingspan wider than a jumbo jet just spent days soaring off the US Gulf Coast for a military-sponsored test. In a past life, it was a pioneering aircraft that made the first solar-powered flight around the world. 🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2489...

Since 2015, freshwater loss from land — mainly from pumping groundwater — has contributed more to sea level rise than melt from Antarctic ice sheet. 🧪

I dove into the long and deeply weird history of fictional female bots, from mechanical femme fatales to perfect robotic housewives

There's was lots of concern when we learned the land carbon sink in 2023 virtually disappeared due to fire, heat, and drought. Early estimates suggest it happened again in 2024 -- but for different reason.🧪

You'd expect the first stars to form at the beginning of the universe but surprisingly, astronomers have found a galaxy full of just-born stars much, much later (hundreds of millions of years later) www.newscientist.com/article/2489...

Trump's new executive order requires companies with US government contracts to remove ideological bias from AI models. This sets a potentially impossible goal when taken at face value – and could allow the administration to elevate its own preferred worldview. 🧪 www.newscientist.com/article/2489...