Table of contents for 21 June 2025 in New Scientist

HOW does our brain, which is capable of generating complex thoughts and actions, grow out of essentially nothing? An experiment using an electronic implant inside tadpoles may have got us closer to an answer. Past attempts to peer into neurodevelopmental processes have relied on tools like functional magnetic resonance imaging or hard electrode wires stuck into the brain. But the imaging resolution was too low to be useful, while hard wires damaged the brain too much. Now, Jia Liu at Harvard University and his colleagues have identified a type of perfluropolymer whose softness and conformability matches that of brains. They used it to build a soft, stretchable mesh around ultrathin conductors that they then placed onto the neural plate – a flat, accessible structure that forms the neural tube, the…

BY MANIPULATING light into a fluid-like form, then using it to simulate space-time, researchers hope to unlock new insights on the nature of black holes. Supermassive cosmic objects, such as black holes, are very difficult to study directly, but researchers can construct useful analogues in the laboratory using quantum effects. For example, researchers previously simulated space-time – the fabric of our physical reality – using extremely cold atoms, then populated it with the equivalents of black holes. Now, Kévin Falque at the Kastler–Brossel Laboratory (LKB) in Paris and his colleagues have used light to create a wellcontrolled space-time analogue. To do so, they confined light in a small cavity made from a reflective semiconductor material, where it bounced between the layers of the material and interacted with electric charges within…

THE damage to the body caused by the most common type of inherited kidney disease was thought to be irreversible. But now, animal studies suggest that correcting the responsible mutations via CRISPR gene editing can reverse at least some of it. Polycystic kidney disease (PKD) causes extensive changes to the kidneys over time. “It really seemed unlikely that you could change that even if you correct [the mutation],” says Michael Kaminski at the Charité – Berlin University of Medicine in Germany. “But now it seems that the disease might be more plastic than somehow previously appreciated.” PKD leads to fluid-filled cysts that grow larger over time, forming in the kidneys and often also in the liver. These organs eventually fail, meaning people need dialysis or a transplant to stay alive.…

WHEN I was about 7 or 8 years old, my biologyprofessor dad brought me a present home from work: a jar of sticks. Or at least that’s what I thought it was. When some of them started moving he explained that they were stick insects. I kept them for a while and found them fascinating. They weren’t cute and cuddly but they had something else: they were cool. Seems I was ahead of my time. Last month, two Belgian teenagers were released from jail in Kenya after paying a fine for wildlife piracy. Their crime, to which they pleaded guilty, was attempting to smuggle 5000 ants out of the country. Smuggled ants often turn up in what reports describe as a “booming” global trade in exotic invertebrate pets. Their haul…

Book V Is for Venom Kathryn Harkup Bloomsbury Sigma AGATHA CHRISTIE’S five-decade writing career saw her poison dozens of her characters, supplying the killers in her stories with an assortment of deadly chemicals, including poisons and venoms produced by living organisms and delivered via injection. Chemist Kathryn Harkup has visited their use before in 2015’s A Is for Arsenic. V Is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s chemicals of death looks at “the more unusual means of chemical killing that [make] Agatha Christie a true ‘Queen of Crime’.” Christie’s murders were made all the more authentic due to her scientific background: she was a pharmaceutical dispenser before she became a bestselling writer, and she furthered her knowledge of toxicology while volunteering as a nurse during the first world war. Harkup presents a…

Editor’s pick So much for the dawn of the AI revolution 24 May, p 27 From Arthur Barnett, London, UK As an aside to your look at a book on hype over AI abilities, we had an unfortunate encounter with an AI that was recently introduced to health software that triages for our local doctor’s office. I was referred by a pharmacist to my doctor because my eyes had developed a severe allergic reaction to our daughter’s dog. The AI ignored the referral by another health professional and other evidence like well-controlled, life-long eczema and the specific issue of the eyes. It simply took over the process, saying: “Hello Arthur, we see you have a rash…” I then ended up down a rabbit hole of irrelevant questions from which I…

→ The best way to avoid a tick-borne disease is to not get bitten at all. Ticks lurk in tall grass or vegetation, waiting for passersby. You can prevent them from latching onto your skin by wearing long trousers, tucked into socks, and long sleeves. → Check your body, and those of your children and pets. Ticks are often found on the head, the underarms, groin and along the waist and in the belly button, but check everywhere. → If you do find a tick, use tweezers to grasp it as close to the skin as you can and gently pull up. Try not to twist or crush the tick, as the mouthparts could break off in the skin and cause infection. Dispose of the tick and clean the area with an antiseptic.…

Storks versus babies A few weeks ago, Feedback waxed lyrical about how correlation does not equal causation after seeing a study that found a link between events on the sun and births of future Nobel laureates (31 May). This prompted reader Tony Lang to write in with a similar tale. “Many years ago I saw an article with two identically shaped graphs, albeit with selective choices for the vertical axes,” writes Tony. “One was the number of live human births in Germany. The other was the number of storks in Germany during the same period.” Feedback was delighted – nothing like an easy follow-up – but then we saw Tony’s final line. “I didn’t keep a copy so I can’t give you any information about where or when it was…

SHOULD politicians ensure that AI helps us colonise the galaxy, or protect people from the overreach of big tech? The former sounds more fun, but it shouldn’t be the priority. Among the Silicon Valley set, superintelligent AI is viewed as a rapidly approaching inevitability, with tech CEOs promising that the 2030s will see a golden era of progress (see page 10). That attitude has reached Westminster and Washington, with think tanks telling politicians to be ready to harness the power of incoming AI and the Trump administration backing OpenAI’s $500 billion initiative for ultrapowerful AI data centres. It all sounds exciting, but as the great and the good dream of superintelligence, what we might call “stupid intelligence” is causing problems in the here and now. One of the questions facing…

AN EXTREMELY high-energy particle that was spotted tearing through Earth and was thought to be an unusual neutrino may be something even wilder: a particle of dark matter travelling across the cosmos. The KM3NeT detector, off the coast of Italy, spotted this “impossible” neutrino in 2023 while it was under construction. The particle in question was 35 times more energetic than any seen before. Where it came from remains a mystery, with possible sources including a galaxy with a very active central black hole known as a blazar, or a background source of high-energy neutrinos pervading the universe. Bhupal Dev at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues suggest the event might not have been a neutrino at all, but instead a dark matter particle crashing into our…

TINY balls of lab-grown blood vessels helped restore blood flow to injured tissue in mice, minimising necrosis. This approach could one day be used to reduce the damage caused by things like blood clots. Researchers have previously made clumps of lab-grown blood vessels, known as organoids, by immersing human stem cells in a cocktail of chemicals. But this method takes a few weeks and often produces vessels that poorly mimic those in the body, says Juan Melero-Martin at Harvard University. In an alternative approach, Melero-Martin and his colleagues genetically engineered human stem cells that were made by reprogramming skin cells. They gave the stem cells a genetic sequence that causes them to develop into blood vessels in the presence of the antibiotic doxycycline. “We managed to get blood vessel organoids…

Alexis Wnuk Subeditor New York I enjoyed the new space show at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York City this week. Narrated by actor Pedro Pascal, Encounters in the Milky Way takes viewers on a mesmerising journey through our galactic neighbourhood. The show does a great job of illustrating just how dynamic and chock-full of stuff our galaxy is. For instance, of course I knew that Earth orbits the sun, but I hadn’t appreciated that everything – our sun, its stellar neighbours – is in constant motion, zooming around the centre of the Milky Way. In one captivating sequence, visualised here, I learned that a star system called Gliese 710 is due to pass through the Oort cloud, a vast area of icy objects surrounding…

IF YOU wave your hand in front of your face, you won’t notice anything particularly interesting. Perhaps a gentle waft of air against your cheek – that’s about it. No epiphany. No major sign that anything out of the ordinary has occurred. And yet it is often when we look below the surface of the everyday that we find the extraordinary. I believe that when we sweep a hand through the air – or indeed when anything moves at all – space-time is imprinted with a memory of what happened. The change resulting from this motion may be far too subtle for us ever to discern, but on the scales of the wider cosmos, space-time’s memory is crucial. In fact, I would go further. I have come to believe that…

SEA star larvae have been successfully cryopreserved and then reactivated – an important milestone that could help re-establish a critically endangered keystone species. Beginning in 2013, sea star wasting syndrome spread along the west coast of North America, wiping out populations of species including sunflower stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) and giant pink stars (Pisaster brevispinus). The loss of these predators led to a big expansion of sea urchins, which contributed to northern California losing 97 per cent of its kelp forest canopy. Sunflower stars are now functionally extinct in California and intense efforts are under way to raise them so they can be reintroduced to the wild. When giant pink stars spawned at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California, in January, vials of the 2-day-old larvae were shipped…

A VOLCANO seems to have been identified near the rim of Jezero crater on Mars, which is being explored by NASA’s Perseverance rover. Perseverance landed in the crater in 2021 and has gradually made its way to the western rim, driving up a dried-up river that is thought to have flowed about 3 to 4 billion years ago. The vehicle has been collecting samples that were intended to be returned to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return mission in the 2030s, although that is now threatened by the Trump administration’s proposed sweeping cuts at NASA. Some of the material it has gathered was thought to be volcanic, including signs of lava flows. Now, James Wray at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and his colleagues have found…

SPACEX’S Starlink satellites are unintentionally emitting radio waves to such an extent that it could threaten our ability to study the early universe. Interference from the thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit, where they provide a global internet service, has been a concern for astronomers, who say that the radio emissions from the craft could affect sensitive telescopes that observe distant, and faint, radio sources. SpaceX has tried to prevent this interference by switching off their internet-transmitting beams when they fly over key telescopes, but that isn’t enough. Steven Tingay at Curtin University in Australia and his colleagues have tracked the signals from nearly 2000 Starlink satellites using a prototype telescope from the Square Kilometre Array-Low observatory (SKA-Low) in Australia. This planned collection of more than 100,000 small, linked telescopes…

Book The Science of Revenge James Kimmel Jr. Harmony Books FEW people may readily own up to thirsting for revenge – yet it is undeniable that some of us do. From US President Donald Trump’s fixation on score-settling to the “cancel culture” of policing on social media, and maybe even the felling of the iconic Sycamore Gap tree in the UK – possibly an attempt at payback due to one of those found guilty being at risk of eviction – revenge may be more plausible than love as the force that makes the world turn. Could we even go so far as to call it an addiction? James Kimmel Jr. argues passionately that we can – and we must, if the world is ever to become a more compassionate place.…

TO MAKE good art, you must be specific. Perhaps that is too sweeping a statement – and so rather contradictory – but it is a fundamental principle I live by. It is no good chasing the lowest common denominator in the hope of attracting an audience. Whether it is a song, a painting or a poem, it is the specificities that we latch on to and fall in love with. This may be why, with hundreds of TV apocalypses out there, The Eternaut is such a breath of fresh air. The new Netflix show adapts a classic comic book series written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld that was published in 1957 and much adored in his home of Argentina. It also includes themes from a reboot of the story in 1969…

TUCKED away in a ground-floor lab in Richmond, Virginia, is a bank of industrial freezers containing thousands of transparent, thumb-sized plastic tubes. Each is filled with a clear, yellowish fluid – blood serum taken from opossums, raccoons, black bears, coyotes, vultures and many other animals. These vials, the world’s largest collection of blood serum from wildlife, are the life’s work of Virginia Commonwealth University molecular biologist Richard Marconi. Almost every sample here is infected with some kind of tick-borne pathogen – mostly the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, one of the most widespread tickborne diseases, but others as well. That means, says Marconi, that most wild animals in North America have been infected. Those animals represent a vast and growing reservoir of viral, parasitic and bacterial pathogens for ticks to…

BECAUSE I’m based in the northern hemisphere, my suggestions of what to look for in the skies can sometimes be skewed towards what we can see from that half of the planet. So, in this month’s column I’ll focus on a feature of our skies that is undoubtedly best when viewed from the southern hemisphere, and particularly at this time of year: the Milky Way. Every star you can see with the naked eye belongs to our galaxy, which means whenever you see stars, you are seeing within the Milky Way. So when stargazers refer to the Milky Way, they mean the bulge teeming with stars and dust that sit towards the centre of the spiral galaxy. The plane of the Milky Way is offset from the plane of our…