Table of contents for 4 October 2025 in New Scientist Australian Edition

OLDER fathers, extreme air pollution, antidepressants and untreated gestational diabetes. These are all factors whose possible links to autism, however tentative, have been flagged in pregnancy handbooks. Such manuals are packed with warnings about everything from diet and exercise to what position a mother-to-be sleeps in, and how these everyday decisions might affect your pregnancy or unborn child. In the midst of so much advice, it can be tempting to adopt a “better safe than sorry” approach. Now, expectant parents are faced with fresh advice, this time from none other than US president Donald Trump, who warned against taking the painkiller paracetamol (also known as acetaminophen) during pregnancy. While it is true that some studies have found correlations between paracetamol use in pregnancy and risk of autism, there is no…

DNA repair may be one thing that affects lifespan (see main story) – and centenarians can offer clues to others. Until she died on 19 August 2024, aged 117 years and 168 days, María Branyas Morera, of Spain, was officially the world’s oldest person. When she was 116, a team of researchers collected blood, saliva and stool samples to analyse her genetics, microbiome and lifestyle. Morera, who showed no sign of dementia, had many gene variants that keep blood lipid levels low, protecting the heart and cognition. Blood test results also revealed her lipid metabolism was among the most efficient ever reported. Team member Manel Esteller at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, says Morera didn’t drink alcohol or smoke, and adhered to a Mediterranean diet. She…

AN EXPERIMENTAL gene therapy has become the first treatment to successfully slow the progression of Huntington’s disease. While the findings are still preliminary, the approach could be a major breakthrough and may lead to new therapies for other neurodegenerative conditions, like Parkinson’s. How does the therapy work? The treatment, called AMT-130, targets abnormal proteins in the brain that are responsible for the progression of Huntington’s disease. People with the condition have a genetic mutation that causes the normally-benign huntingtin protein to accumulate in toxic clumps inside brain cells, ultimately killing them. Over time, this leads to memory loss, difficulty walking, slurred speech and other symptoms. The experimental therapy, developed by the Dutch biotechnology company uniQure, stops the production of these mutant proteins by delivering genetic material to brain cells packaged…

WE HAVE found hot wind blasting out from our galaxy’s supermassive black hole for the first time, which could help explain its mysterious inactivity. Compared with many other supermassive black holes that lie at the centres of galaxies, our black hole, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, is relatively quiet. It doesn’t shoot out vast, powerful jets like black holes in many other galaxies do, which are so bright we can spot them even in the earliest moments of the universe. But all supermassive black holes, including Sgr A*, are thought to produce winds – wafts of hot gas blasted out from near the black hole’s event horizon, where gas is swirling and violently heating up. These winds, however, have never been conclusively detected in Sgr A*, despite being predicted…

HYPOTHETICAL particles called axions have been sought by physicists for decades, as they are the leading candidate for what makes up dark matter. But we may not need new experiments to find exotic particles similar to axions – evidence of them could be hiding in data from particle collider experiments we have already done. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, reveals new particles by accelerating and crashing together others we already understand quite well, such as protons and ions, and then analysing the resulting debris. Now, Gustavo Gil da Silveira at CERN and his colleagues have considered another possibility: if a proton or an ion emitted a new particle as a result of being accelerated on its way to getting smashed into…

DID you know that, in physics, we have beauty factories? This has nothing to do with art or glamour. Instead, I am talking about experiments where electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, are collided together to produce particles called B mesons. These are made of quarks, the subatomic particles found within ordinary matter. But while such matter is almost exclusively composed of electrons, up quarks and down quarks, a B meson is made up of a beauty antiquark and an up, down, charm or strange quark. This make-up gives B mesons an extremely short existence, far removed from daily life, so you might wonder why anyone would bother devoting whole facilities we now call B factories to making them. The answer is that B mesons can help us solve a…

Book The Period Brain Sarah Hill Vermilion (UK); Harvest (US) WHEN I lived with my parents, my mother said she could always tell when my period was approaching: I raided the snack cupboard a little more frequently and became a lot more irritable. I remember all hell breaking loose when she accidentally bought chicken breasts instead of thighs on a night I was supposed to cook. Such outbursts are typical of premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, a common condition that is the focus of the book The Period Brain: The new science of why we PMS and how to fix it. Author Sarah Hill, who has also written about the effects of birth control on the brain, sets out how readers can ease PMS symptoms, with a particular focus on lifestyle…

Editor’s pick Keep digging in the hunt for Martian life 20 September, p 10  From Ernest Ager, High Peak, Derbyshire, UK  With the recent news of some possible signs of ancient life on the Martian surface, there will naturally follow the usual comments – that even if there were any life long ago, there won’t be any living now, due to the hostile surface conditions. However, once life started on Earth, it quickly spread to an enormous range of habitats, such as deep underground. It can survive in the absence of light, without oxygen and by using chemical redox reactions as an energy source. If we find that life did indeed start on Mars and was present for a reasonably long time, I would suggest that it is highly likely…

Studies increasingly link consumption of fermented foods, particularly dairy ferments, to a reduced risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity. For instance, consumption of yogurt is linked with a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, possibly due to compounds called bioactive peptides released by the fermentation process. And a clinical trial showed that a diet high in fermented foods resulted in a greater diversity of gut microbes and a reduction in levels of inflammatory compounds in blood. However, there is a long way to go before the health effects of ferments are firmly established. Nevertheless, these discoveries raise the possibility of designing novel fermented foods not only for their taste, but for enhanced levels of beneficial compounds or their ability to boost our gut microbiome. It is very…

THE mummified remains of seven cheetahs, some dating back thousands of years, have been reported in caves in Saudi Arabia – the first naturally mummified big cats ever found by scientists. Cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) were eradicated from the Arabian peninsula decades ago, but Ahmed Boug at the National Center for Wildlife in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and his colleagues have now reported details of seven mummified cheetahs, along with the skeletal remains of 54 others, which they found during surveys in the Lauga cave network in northern Saudi Arabia in 2022 and 2023 (Research Square, doi.org/p7cp). The mummies – defined by the preservation of their soft tissues due to a halting of the decay process – date from between about 4000 and 100 years ago. “The findings are truly remarkable,” says Anne…

A SPRINKLING of nanoparticles could be the solution to a problem that has long plagued plastics manufacturers – namely, how do you make a material that is strong, tough and easy to work with? Hu-Jun Qian at Jilin University in China and his colleagues call this the plastics trilemma: making a polymer stronger, or harder to deform, tends to make it more brittle, or less tough, while attempting to improve both of these properties at once normally makes the material more viscous and harder to work with. To get around this, the researchers mixed nanoparticles made from polystyrene with several commonly used plastic materials. For example, they added the nanoparticles to PEMA, a polymer that is used to make hearing aids and artificial nails, and PVC, which is used in…

THE average size of trees in the Amazon rainforest has been steadily increasing as carbon dioxide levels have risen, meaning these larger trees play a more important role in maintaining the forest as a carbon sink. How forests will react to a changing climate is an open question. One hypothesis is that larger trees will decrease in abundance because they are more susceptible to climate-linked phenomena such as drought. Understanding this is crucial for future climate models because forests take up huge amounts of CO₂ from the atmosphere. Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues at the RAINFOR Amazon Forest Inventory Network have been measuring the diameter of trees in 188 plots with an average area of 12,000 square metres across the Amazon basin. The monitoring periods varied,…

A DINOSAUR that may have been one of the fiercest of the Cretaceous period has been excavated in South America – with an extinct crocodile’s leg in its jaws. The remains of the dinosaur, named Joaquinraptor casali – a species of megaraptor that is new to science – were discovered in the headwaters of the Rio Chico river in Patagonia, Argentina, in 2019. It is thought that it lived just before the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, 66 million years ago. Now, Lucio Ibiricu at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Chubut, Argentina, and his colleagues have studied the fossil in detail, and were surprised by what they found in the mouth of the near-complete skull. “The humerus, or legbone, of an extinct crocodile relative was between the jaws…

THESE endearing photos of bats are a far cry from how these animals are often perceived – linked to fictional evildoers, or blamed for real-life diseases, most recently covid-19, due to the viruses they harbour. But the mammals deserve far more sympathy and attention, argues ecologist Yossi Yovel, based at Tel Aviv University in Israel, in his forthcoming book The Genius Bat: Understanding our most mysterious mammal. Although bats do host viruses, the evidence suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus didn’t come directly from them. In any case, he says, bats are a vital part of ecosystems, pollinating plants and keeping insect populations in check. Across the 1400-plus species of bat, there are boundless variations. Take the resourceful Honduran white bats (Ectophylla alba, near left at bottom). These snow-white puffballs are…

Jacob Aron News editor  London Just over 50 years ago, US astronauts and Soviet Union cosmonauts met in space for a ceremonial handshake. This mission serves as the background for former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s latest alt-history space thriller, Final Orbit, which introduces an accident that kills half the crew. Meanwhile, Hadfield revives the cancelled 1960s Shuguang space programme in order to place the first Chinese astronaut in orbit almost three decades earlier than in reality. With these pieces in place, he tells the story of a clandestine three-way space conflict, and gives us possibly the most realistic depiction of a “battle” between two spacecraft ever written. As in his previous books, Hadfield expertly weaves fact, fiction and his own experiences in orbit to produce a novel that is both…

SOME things in cosmology may simply be unknowable. Why is there something rather than nothing? What lies outside the universe? What is inside a black hole? That last one has been niggling at astrophysicists for more than a century, but they may finally be on the brink of figuring it out. The traditional answer is that inside a black hole is a singularity: an infinitely small point of infinite density. If singularities are real, that could tell us something profound – not just about black holes, but also about our understanding of physics writ large. But nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole, so it has long been thought impossible to tell if these seemingly implausible points truly exist, or if there is some unknown physics that stops…

AN EXPLODING star may have sent cosmic shrapnel flying to hit Earth 10 million years ago, and astronomers have narrowed down the most likely culprits behind this interstellar incident. Earlier this year, Dominik Koll at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany and his colleagues discovered a spike of radioactive beryllium buried in metallic rocks 5 kilometres beneath the Pacific Ocean, which they dated to just over 10 million years old. This form of beryllium is only produced when cosmic rays smash into Earth’s atmosphere, so Koll and his team theorised that it could be from a supernova that exploded long ago. However, there were other possible explanations, such as the sun’s magnetic shielding of Earth being weaker at that time, or beryllium being deposited there by stronger ocean currents from Earth’s…

A DEVICE with more than 6000 quantum bits, or qubits, has smashed a previously-held record and is the first step towards building the largest quantum computer yet. There is currentlyF no single, consensus design for building a quantum computer, but researchers believe that for these devices to be useful, they will have to comprise at least tens of thousands of qubits. The current record holder is a machine from Atom Computing, with 1180 qubits, but Hannah Manetsch at the California Institute of Technology and her colleagues have now built a device with 6100 qubits (Nature, doi.org/p66d). Each of these is a neutral caesium atom cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero and controlled by laser beams, with all 6100 of them arranged in a neat grid. The researchers designed the…

IF WE can fully map the structure of our brains, will we be able to understand how they work? That is the goal of researchers attempting to build a wiring diagram, or connectome, of our neural pathways – but now it seems uncovering the secrets of the brain may not be so simple. You can think of the connectome as a map of all the possible roads along which neural signals can travel. But now Sophie Dvali at Princeton University and her colleagues have discovered that some of these roads are underused. The researchers looked at the connectome of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, and compared it with a record of the worm’s neural signals, which they assembled by stimulating each neuron and tracking how the signal it emitted moved…

Book Warhead Nicholas Wright Pan Macmillan (UK); St Martin’s Press (US) DEPENDING on your individual mettle, it is either an uneasy moment to be reading a book about war or a timely one. Given the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Russian drones being shot down in Polish airspace and Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, a third world war has felt imminent in recent weeks. Warhead, an ambitious new book by neuroscientist Nicholas Wright, sheds light on what might be going on in the minds of those responsible for navigating conflicts – and how their very human decision-making might lead to escalation or resolution. Wright’s research looks into neuroscientific, behavioural and technological insights that are useful for understanding and navigating international confrontations. He has also advised the US Pentagon Joint…

LIKE most people, I suspect, I don’t really like thinking about my teenage years – a time of too much brooding and too little self-awareness. But despite any lingering embarrassment I might feel, I have never seen adolescence as some mistake or aberration we would ideally do away with. That’s not the case for many characters in Wayward, an eight-part mystery series from writer-comedian Mae Martin. It is set at a mysterious academy in the fictional small town of Tall Pines, Vermont, that promises to pacify unruly teens and solve adolescence. Head of the school is Evelyn Wade (Toni Collette), a towering presence who dominates the “progressive, intentional community” of Tall Pines with her saccharine, New Age philosophy. But peel back a few layers and there is little love and…

“IT’S blue cheese, but not as you’ve ever known it before,” says Paul Dyer, as we peer into a fridge full of very special cheeses that he helped create. When I try a sample, it blows my socks off – the best I have ever tasted. The cheese is a Danish blue co-created by Myconeos, a company Dyer founded in Nottingham, UK. Myconeos doesn’t make the cheese, but it bred the fungus that gives it its unique taste. For centuries, blue-cheesemakers have relied on the same old strains of Penicillium roqueforti, which is why the classic blues all taste essentially the same. But not anymore. Thanks to a breakthrough that Dyer and his colleagues made a couple of years ago, cheese-makers suddenly have a range of new strains to play…

THE next few months will be a wonderful time for moon lovers, because we have four supermoons coming up – in a row. These exceptional full moons are the Hunter’s moon in October, the Beaver moon in November, the aptly named (for the northern hemisphere, at least) Cold moon in December and January’s Wolf moon. The key to being a supermoon is that it appears a little bigger and brighter than a regular full moon. A supermoon occurs when a full moon happens when our satellite is at its closest point to Earth on its elliptical orbit around the planet. This makes it appear up to 8 per cent bigger and 15 per cent brighter than a regular full moon – things that skywatchers all over the world can see.…

What’s in a squeak? Feedback’s experience of mice is sadly confined to the dead ones (or, sometimes, barely alive ones) that one of our felines insists on bringing into the house. This means we have heard more than our fair share of squeaks. So we were taken aback to learn that mouse squeaks have been almost entirely ignored by science. Reporter Alex Wilkins assures us that it is true, having read a recent study in Biology Letters entitled “Hidden in plain sound: the scientific potential of house mouse squeaks”. The thrust is that studies of house mouse vocalisations have focused on ultrasonic sounds that humans can’t hear. Possibly these felt novel and surprising, so they stole the limelight. Meanwhile, the authors say, audible squeaks “have received less attention”, leading to…