Table of contents for 17 January 2026 in New Scientist

THE last big breakthrough in treating depression was all the way back in the 1980s. That was when Prozac, the first SSRI antidepressant, was released. It and its subsequent copycats soon swept the globe, and hundreds of millions of people have now taken this kind of medication. But while three-quarters of people say the pills have helped them feel better, they don’t work for everyone. With rising rates of depression – and no major treatment advances since the advent of SSRIs – it seems almost inevitable that some hope that AI can be psychiatry’s next big thing. The caveats are well known. Chatbots are only as good as the data they are trained on, have our own biases baked in and are prone to errors described by some as “hallucinations”.…

A MAN in Massachusetts with auto-brewery syndrome, a rare condition in which gut microbes produce intoxicating levels of alcohol, has been successfully treated with faeces from a donor. The man, a retired US Marine officer in his 60s, started experiencing odd symptoms after taking multiple courses of antibiotics to treat an inflamed prostate. He had been fit and healthy, and had only an occasional alcoholic drink, but he suddenly began feeling very drunk, disoriented and sleepy on a regular basis. The man visited the emergency department on several occasions, but no one believed he hadn’t been drinking. Eventually, he was diagnosed with auto-brewery syndrome. After connecting with a patient support group, the man learned that faecal transplants were being considered as a potential treatment. This inspired him to call Elizabeth…

Just as elephant hunting might go back further than we thought (see main story), so too could the use of poison arrows. Traces of plant toxins have been found on 60,000-year-old arrow tips in South Africa. Until recently, the evidence for the use of poison arrows only extended back to around 8000 years ago. Then in 2020, an analysis of arrow points dating to between 50,000 and 80,000 years old found they were consistent with the design of poisoned arrow tips from the past 150 years. That team, led by Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, found that one 60,000-year-old bone point was coated in a sticky liquid, but they couldn’t conclusively demonstrate the presence of poison. Now, Lombard and her team have discovered that five 60,000-year-old…

Book Off the Scales Aimee Donnellan HarperCollins, UK; St. Martin’s Press, US I’M NOT looking to get into a debate about how well old comedy shows have aged. But when I rewatch Friends, I feel uncomfortable at how Monica is depicted as a younger person: not just overweight, but laughable, greedy, lazy and, frankly, unattractive. More than two decades on from the final episode of the iconic series, I am optimistic that the tide is turning on how society responds to people who are overweight or have obesity. And I wonder if some of that is due to drugs like Ozempic. This and other GLP-1 drugs, which mimic a gut hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1, are the subject of Off the Scales: The inside story of Ozempic and the race to cure…

Book The Uncertainty Toolkit Sam Conniff and Katherine Templar-Lewis Bluebird (UK, now; US, April) FEW people have withstood the stress that fighter pilot John Peters faced during the Gulf War. After completing a mission in January 1991, his plane was struck by a missile in the desert near Basra in southern Iraq. Peters and his navigator John Nichol ejected and ran for 2 to 3 hours before Iraqi soldiers caught them. As a prisoner of war, Peters was subjected to brutal interrogations. The prospect of dying alone was never far from his mind. Yet, somehow, he made it through. After leaving the air force, he studied business management and now works as a motivational speaker. Could we learn something from his resilience to help with our own stress? That’s the…

Greek flair Few things excite a certain kind of film fan more than the release of a new Christopher Nolan movie. July 2026 will see the release of his take on The Odyssey, the epic poem from ancient Greece about a soldier trying to get home to his family after the Trojan war, only to be beset by monsters, bad weather and – worst of all – a number of attractive ladies who want him to live with them. What will Nolan do with this classic yarn? While we wait to find out, we can argue about the historical accuracy of the costumes. Early images and a trailer have been released, showing how Nolan’s team has represented Greek armour from the Mycenaean Age. People with knowledge of the period have…

FOUR planets orbiting a newly born star in our galaxy are so light they have the density of polystyrene, and could help us understand how common planetary systems form. Our solar system is unusual compared with most other planetary systems in the Milky Way, which typically contain planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Astronomers have found hundreds of planetary systems like these, but almost all of them are formed around stars that are billions of years old, making it difficult to explain how they take shape. Now, a team led by John Livingston at the Astrobiology Center in Tokyo, Japan, and Erik Petigura at the University of California, Los Angeles, has identified four tightly clustered planets that orbit a young, 20-million-year-old star called V1298 Tau. The researchers used telescopes…

A UK satellite is wearing the latest in high-tech knitwear. Called CarbSAR, it went into orbit on 11 January, deploying a mesh radar antenna produced on a machine more commonly found in a textiles factory. “It’s a very standard, off-the-shelf industrial machine used for knitting jumpers. All we’ve done is add some bells and whistles to let it stitch our special yarns,” says Amool Raina, production lead at Oxford Space Systems (OSS) in the UK. The company partnered with Surrey Satellite Technology Limited to mount the antenna onto a small spacecraft capable of capturing high-resolution images of Earth’s surface. The “wool” in OSS’s knitting process is an ultra-fine tungsten wire coated in gold. The company’s machine turns out metres of fabric at a time. These mesh sheets can be cut…

THE Heisenberg uncertainty principle puts a limit on how precisely we can measure certain properties of quantum objects. But researchers may have found a way to bypass this limitation using a quantum version of a neural network. Given, for example, a chemically useful molecule, how can you predict what properties it might have in an hour, or tomorrow? To make such predictions, researchers start by measuring its current properties. But for quantum objects, each measurement can interfere with or change the outcome of the next one. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that some quantum properties of objects cannot be precisely measured simultaneously. For example, if you measure a quantum particle’s momentum extremely well, measuring its position will return only an approximate number. “This method will allow scientists to learn about…

COMMONLY used AI models fail to accurately diagnose or offer advice for many queries relating to women’s health that require urgent attention. A group of 17 women’s health researchers, pharmacists and clinicians from the US and Europe drew up an initial list of 345 medical queries across five areas, including emergency medicine, gynaecology and neurology. These experts then reviewed the answers provided by a randomly chosen AI model for each question. Those that led to inaccurate responses were collated into a benchmarking test of AI models’ medical expertise that included 96 queries. This test was then used to assess 13 large language models, produced by the likes of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral AI and xAI. Across all the models, some 60 per cent of questions were answered in a way…

IT IS mid-January, so many of us will be in the middle of a New Year detox: cutting back on screentime, perhaps, or abstaining from alcohol. I have been wondering whether you could apply the same logic to the brain: is there anything I can do now the festive fun is over to help clear away my cognitive cobwebs? In fact, the brain performs its own kind of detox every day – clearing out the waste products generated by metabolism that would otherwise build up and cause damage. But can we help this along? And if so, might that protect us from age-related cognitive decline and dementia? Let’s start by meeting the brain’s cleaning crew, beginning with the glymphatic system. This relatively recently discovered waste-removal pathway “sucks out” unwanted proteins…

Book Love Machines James Muldoon Faber & Faber ARTIFICIAL intelligence is now unavoidable – although there are those among us who try. Even if you don’t seek out a chatbot, you will see new icons in your current apps to bring them within a single click: WhatsApp, Google Drive, even Microsoft Notepad, the simplest program imaginable. The tech industry is making an enormous and costly bet on AI, and, in turn, is forcing it on users to make good on this investment. Many are embracing it to take over writing, admin or planning, and a minority are going a step further and forming intimate relationships with it. James Muldoon’s Love Machines: How artificial intelligence is transforming our relationships looks at how humans are getting extremely close with chatbots, either general…

Editor’s pick An educator’s view on artificial intelligence 27 December, p 24 From Richard Hind, Chapel Haddlesey, North Yorkshire, UK Since 2002, I have been teaching in the further education sector and have seen the impact of new technologies. AI is the most disruptive so far. I started to think about how these models learn, in the context of some well-established theories of learning. While large language models (LLMs) appear to be capable of higher-order cognitive skills, such as analysis, application of knowledge and evaluation, I question the depth of their “understanding”. There has been much written around this problem, including the book The Neural Mind, which you reviewed. LLM intelligence is based purely on absorbing vast amounts of information and being able to extract complex patterns. However, unlike us,…

A YOUNG galaxy cluster in the early universe is defying our understanding of how these huge structures formed and evolved. The gas that fills this cluster, called SPT2349-56, is far hotter and more abundant than it should be, and researchers aren’t sure why. Dazhi Zhou at the University of British Columbia in Canada and his colleagues observed the cluster using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile and found that towards its centre, the intracluster gas has a temperature of at least several tens of millions of degrees (Nature, doi.org/qmfp). “The temperature of the surface of the sun is a few thousand degrees Celsius, so this entire area is hotter than the sun,” says Zhou. “From our conservative calculation, it is five to 10 times hotter than expected based on simulations…

TWO nonchalant physicists, one with a wry smile, are monitoring some of the most advanced quantum technology in the UK, an ultra-stable laser at the National Physical Laboratory in London. This enigmatic photograph, far left, taken by David Severn as part of a series of photographs for King’s College London’s Quantum Untangled exhibition, has also been shortlisted for the Portrait of Britain award. “The portrait provides a rare insight into a usually hidden world. It’s as if the viewer has just opened the ordinarily off limits door to their laboratory,” says Severn. He had no prior knowledge of quantum mechanics before embarking on the project and was briefed with capturing the people and laboratories working with quantum physics in the UK today. His photos capture a swathe of modern quantum…

Alison Flood Culture editor London It’s January, which means I am slogging through Dry January after the festive overindulgence. This year, however, I am doing so with a book in hand: Charles Knowles’s Why We Drink Too Much, a guide not only to why we drink, but also to what happens in our bodies and brains when we do. Knowles is a surgeon and clinical research director, so there is plenty of science and stats here. He is also a recovering alcoholic, and the book moves between the data and his own story of how he hit rock bottom and climbed back up again. The book’s approach is unusual and, I think, impactful, with sections also included from Knowles’s wife Annie, in which she talks about the effects of his…

WITH the turning of the calendar, many of us may have started reappraising our lives. As one Dear David reader reports, however, our soul-searching can often yield confusion rather than insight. “My New Year’s Resolution is to feel more fulfilled – but I don’t know how to start,” he tells me. “What can I do to find a new sense of direction?” A little frustration is par for the course. Contrary to what most self-help gurus tell you, there is no shortcut to happiness that will work for all. That said, a few reflective exercises should help to realign your priorities, vastly increasing the chances that you will find a better path. Michaéla C. Schippers and Niklas Ziegler at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands describe this process as “life…