Table of contents for 5 July 2025 in New Scientist

THE discovery that cancer cells are taking the energy-generating parts of nerve cells to help them grow could help improve treatments against the deadliest tumours. “This is the first time that mitochondrial exchange has been demonstrated from nerves to cancer cells,” says Elizabeth Repasky at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It’s a major next step in cancer neuroscience, a field that’s exploding.” “This is the first time mitochondrial exchange has been seen from nerve to cancer cells” We already knew that nerve cells, or neurons, within and surrounding tumours produce proteins and electrical signals that help cancer grow and spread. “Cancers with higher nerve density are associated with poorer prognosis,” says Simon Grelet at the University of South Alabama.…

SHIPPING tankers, drones and fishing boats could be used to drag massive parachutes through the waters of the Atlantic Ocean as part of a drastic plan to avert catastrophic climate change. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) transports warm water from the tropics northwards, helping to keep northern Europe temperate. However, a rapidly melting Arctic and warming ocean temperatures are weakening the current, with some scientists fearing it could shut down altogether at some point in the coming century. This would plunge oceanic ecosystems into chaos and rapidly cool Europe’s climate by several degrees. Greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut rapidly to reduce the risk of AMOC collapse, experts stress. But some are considering other, more radical approaches. Stuart Haszeldine at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and David Sevier…

AS EARLY as 12,800 years ago, people captured wild wallabies and transported them in canoes to islands dozens or even hundreds of kilometres away. Native to Sahul – the prehistoric landmass that split into Australia and New Guinea – the marsupials probably accompanied human explorers and traders to islands across South-East Asia as sources of food, decorative pelts and, eventually, bone tools. The imported animals thrived there for thousands of years, in one of the world’s oldest known animal translocations, says Dylan Gaffney at the University of Oxford. “This builds into a global picture where these early people were moving, managing and rearing animals in much more complicated and purposeful ways than we thought,” he says. Scientific work on species translocations has typically focused on European explorers. But in the…

FANCY being in direct, hormonal control of your body and mind? By 2035, a range of options had come to the market. A pickup in the morning? A libido boost at bedtime? Or a period of immunity to pain? All became available. The process started in 2027, when serious surface wounds and internal injuries began to be routinely treated with dressings that were themselves alive. The dressings were of a class known as engineered living materials (ELMs), which produced enzymes and antibiotics to speed up healing. ELMs were inspired by the biofilm that sometimes forms on vinegar and is also used to make the fermented drink kombucha. Known as the “mother” layer, the biofilm is a living material, a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY). In vinegar, the SCOBY…

SO FAR, it has been an encouraging year for science fiction. My favourite new offering to date is probably Hal LaCroix’s Here and Beyond, but then, I’m a sucker for a good ark-ship story. In LaCroix’s take on the trope, a vessel called Shipworld is heading for HD-40307g, “a habitable Super Earth hug orbiting a simmering red dwarf star”. It is a journey of 42 light years – meaning that none of the 600 souls who begin the journey will actually live to see HD-40307g. Only the Seventh Generation will make planetfall. There are rules on board. People are given a treatment that allows them to stay healthier longer, but they aren’t allowed to have children until their 50s. Everything must be in support of the Mission – reaching the…

THERE are so many colourful claims out there when it comes to gardening, but there is one in particular that has been doing the rounds recently: “Soil is an antidepressant.” According to this idea, espoused through countless social media posts, Mycobacterium vaccae – a microbe naturally found in soil – can actually boost your mood. All you apparently have to do to experience this benefit is get your hands in contact with earth. The bacteria are said to be absorbed through your skin or inhaled from the air, and they will quickly get to work transforming your brain chemistry for the better. But is all this a bit too good to be true? While the claim may initially seem more than a little outlandish, there have actually been a range…

A LIFELINE has been extended to the people of Tuvalu, a low-lying Pacific nation where rising sea levels are creating ever more problems. Each year, Australia will grant residency to 280 Tuvaluans (see page 8). The agreement could see everyone currently living in Tuvalu move within just a few decades. Effectively the world’s first climate migration agreement, the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union will also provide adaptation funds to help those who stay behind. Is this a model for how climate migration can be managed in an orderly way, before disaster strikes? Far from it. To get this deal, Tuvalu must allow Australia a say in future security and defence matters. Few other countries are likely to agree to similar terms. Tuvalu’s population is also very small. Taking in around 10,000 climate…

A FOUR-SIDED shape that will always come to rest on the same side no matter what side it starts on has been built, decades after it was first proposed to exist. Mathematicians have long been fascinated by self-righting “monostable” shapes, which have a preferred resting spot when placed on a flat surface. In 1966, mathematician John Conway proved it was impossible to do this with a four-sided shape, or tetrahedron, that had an even distribution of mass. However, he said an unevenly balanced monostable tetrahedron could work, but never proved it. Now, Gábor Domokos at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary, and his colleagues have built a monostable tetrahedron, using carbon-fibre struts and a plate made of ultra-dense tungsten carbide. Domokos asked his student, Gergő Almádi, to hunt for…

HEART attacks are no longer the leading cause of death in the US, while deaths from chronic heart conditions have skyrocketed. “We’ve made some really great progress in certain areas of heart disease mortality, but now we’re seeing this shift,” says Sara King at Stanford University in California. She and her colleagues collected data on heart disease deaths from 1970 to 2022 using the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database, which tracks all recorded fatalities in the country. They found that in 2022, heart disease accounted for 24 per cent of all deaths in the US, down from 41 per cent in 1970. The decline is largely thanks to an almost 90 per cent decrease in heart attack deaths, which were once the deadliest form of heart…

INCREASINGLY erratic winter storms in the northern hemisphere aren’t a result of the polar jet stream getting more wavy – although climate change is making winter weather more intense in other ways. The northern polar jet stream is a current of winds that sweeps through the northern hemisphere, steered by the boundaries between temperate air and cold air around the Arctic. For more than a decade, some researchers have suspected that a warming Arctic is causing the jet stream to buckle more dramatically in the winter, causing extreme storms that bring snow and ice further south than usual. But the theory has been hard to verify, in part due to the relatively short satellite data record, and because of the jet stream’s intense natural variability during winter. Erich Osterberg at…

GENERATION Alpha’s internet lingo is mutating faster than teachers, parents and AI models can keep up – potentially exposing youngsters to bullying and grooming that trusted adults and AI-based safety systems can’t see. Manisha Mehta, a 14-year-old student at Warren E. Hyde Middle School in Cupertino, California, and Fausto Giunchiglia at the University of Trento, Italy, collated 100 expressions and phrases popular with Generation Alpha – those born between 2010 and 2025 – from popular gaming, social media and video platforms. The pair asked 24 volunteers aged between 11 and 14, who were Mehta’s classmates, to analyse the phrases alongside context-specific screenshots. They had to explain whether they understood the phrases, in what context they were being used and if that use carried any potential safety concerns or harmful interpretations.…

Editor’s pick Two views on the naming of female body parts 14 June, p 21 From Sam Edge, Ringwood, Hampshire, UK I agree with Adam Taor that some of the terminology used for female anatomy, especially reproductive parts, is extremely paternalistic, if not outright misogynistic, and could do with revision. I remember a discussion on the subject involving Germaine Greer, who recalled that once she had found out “vagina” comes from the Latin for “scabbard”, she began to prefer the earthy, four-letter C-word, as it has a more interesting and less demeaning derivation from Old Norse or possibly Latin. Of course, given the less-than-positive uses to which the C-word is now put, making its anatomical use mainstream might be difficult. From Andrew Evans, Pembroke Dock, UK Taor contends that male…

WHEN you rub a balloon on your hair to make it float and cling, you might not think of it as one of the deepest – and strangest – mysteries of science. When you reach out to open a door and your finger sparks against the doorknob, that doesn’t seem like an enigma that defies explanation. Nor does it when socks stick to the inside of a shirt on the way out of the dryer. Static electricity – or, as scientists prefer to call it, contact electrification – was our species’ first introduction to the electromagnetic force. The word “electricity” was coined in the 1600s and derives from the Greek elektron, or amber. As early as the 6th century BC, the ancients knew that amber rubbed against an animal pelt…

Bleaker house One of the great joys in life, Feedback argues, is the perfect opening sentence of a book – and the concomitant realisation that, yes, this one is going to be good. “It was the day my grandmother exploded.” “As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place.” “Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?” So we, and many others, were horrified by a passage in a recent article in The New Yorker about how artificial intelligence might change reading. The suggestion was that AI might simplify challenging prose into something less tangled. The example offered by writer Joshua Rothman was…

GETTING an X-ray can be uncomfortable – you may have to lie still while you are in pain or have part of your body compressed. But a fabric that makes X-rays easier to detect could eliminate that. “Imagine scanning a child’s injury without immobilising them, or enabling pain-free breast exams,” says Li Xu at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She and her colleagues created a textile called X-Wear that scintillates – meaning it releases light when exposed to X-rays – which could make this a reality. Because X-rays are more difficult to detect than visible light, medical and industrial X-rays, as well as CT scans, use scintillating components. These can pick up X-rays after, for example, passing through a limb, converting the rays that emerge into visible light that can…

GASTRIC bypass surgery may cut the risk of colorectal cancer by altering levels of molecules called bile acids in the blood and small intestine. The findings could lead to new treatments. Gastric bypass surgery involves stapling the stomach to form a small upper pouch and a larger lower pouch. The small intestine is then connected to the upper pouch so food and digestive juices bypass most of the stomach and the start of the small intestine. Prior studies have linked the procedure to a reduced risk of colorectal cancer, but it was unclear why. To find out, Rebecca Kesselring at the University of Freiburg in Germany and her colleagues fed mice a high-fat diet until they gained around 50 per cent of their initial body weight, on average. They then…

JUST over 4 billion years ago, magma from Earth’s mantle infiltrated a fracture in the young planet’s primordial crust. Over the following aeons, nearly all of the planet’s early crust melted back into the mantle except for a small area around this fracture, which survives today. At least, that is the story according to the latest analysis of radioactive isotopes in this rock, which is still accessible on the surface as part of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt, a formation on the shore of Hudson Bay in Canada. This potential sample of Earth’s early crust is the subject of a long-standing debate: is it the world’s oldest rock, or just extremely old? Jonathan O’Neil at the University of Ottawa and his colleagues kicked off the debate in a 2008 study that…

A FLYING machine designed by Leonardo da Vinci may have been much quieter than modern drones. Da Vinci’s “aerial screw”, which he designed in the 1480s, is similar to an Archimedes’ screw, a helix-shaped pump that transports water as it rotates. Da Vinci envisaged the machine as being powered by humans, which would have made it challenging to get off the ground due to weight. But with light electric motors spinning the rotor, it could have actually flown. Rajat Mittal at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and his team built a simulation of the screw and put it in a virtual wind tunnel to see how it would perform while hovering in place, testing it at different rotational speeds, and comparing it with a conventional drone rotor with two blades.…

Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth “He retains a sharp memory of the trap, last summer, his forefoot clamped and the utter terror, and of later waking, woozy, and the awful, human scent all over him, and the thing awkward around his neck… His brother was shot. He saw it happen. One-third of them, at least, die before their first year is out. Already he is a wolf that defies odds.” This young wolf is Slavc, tracked by GPS on an epic walk from Slovenia through the Alps to arrive at the Lessinian plateau, north of Verona, Italy, months later. Intrigued, Adam Weymouth follows Slavc’s route, creating his own epic. His is made of different but resonating strands: humans’ tricky relationship with nature and each other, a continent under environmental pressure –…