Table of contents for 18 October 2025 in New Scientist

Dear reader, This week is one of the most exhilarating in the New Scientist calendar. On 18 and 19 October, tens of thousands of people will gather in London to experience our annual extravaganza, New Scientist Live. We have an incredible line-up of some of the world’s most exciting scientists, authors and big thinkers who will be sharing their ideas with attendees across five huge stages. In between talks, the show floor is a whirlwind of activity, with hands-on demos, robots, insects and even a virtual-reality rollercoaster. This year, we have also added small, in-depth workshops on everything from whisky tasting to forensics. And, as always, we have a dedicated schools day on 20 October complete with plenty of explosions and talks from inspiring scientists to get the imagination racing.…

A SMALL robot submarine is circumnavigating the globe for the first time. Teledyne Marine and Rutgers University New Brunswick in New Jersey launched an underwater glider called Redwing on its Sentinel Mission from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts on 11 October. Rather than a propeller, gliders have a buoyancy engine, a gas-filled piston that slightly changes the craft’s overall buoyancy. An electric motor pushes the piston in to make the glider heavier than water so it slowly sinks, coasting downwards at a shallow angle. On reaching the bottom of the dive at around 1000 metres, the piston is pulled out and the submarine, now buoyant, glides upwards. “Redwing will be gliding with the currents rather than fighting them, travelling at an average speed of 0.75 knots”, or almost 1.4 kilometres per…

NAKED mole rats live for up to 37 years – far longer than other rodents their size. Their longevity could be down to a variant of an immune protein that boosts DNA repair. This discovery might lead to therapies that extend human lifespans, says Zhiyong Mao at Tongji University in Shanghai, China. The immune protein cGAS is found in many animals and sounds the alarm when it detects DNA outside the nucleus of a cell, which could be a sign of cancer or a viral attack. But cGAS is also found in the nucleus of cells. In humans and mice, it suppresses DNA repair, increasing the mutation rate and risk of cancer. Mao’s team has found that the cGAS in naked mole rats has the opposite effect in the nucleus,…

OLDER fathers’ chances of passing on disease-causing mutations to their children is higher than we thought. Genome sequencing has revealed that among men intheir early thirties, around 1 in 50sperm have a disease-causing mutation – which rises to nearly 1in 20 by the age of 70. Would-be parents may want to take this into account, says team member Matthew Neville at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK. For instance, younger men could consider freezing their sperm if they think they are unlikely to have children until they are much older, while older men could consider the various screening techniques available. Recent studies have shown that each of us has around 70 new mutations that neither parent has in most of the cells of their body, with 80 per cent…

THE first ID card I ever had was the flimsy piece of laminated paper that made up my driver’s license. In the US, a driver’s license includes a photo, biometric information (eye colour, height, etc.) and birthdate. This led to usage creep: people used the cards as much more than a mere license to drive. Bars and liquor stores would “card” kids trying to get a drink, taking the information on it as proof that we were the proper legal drinking age of 21. Needless to say, I was 18 when I figured out how to doctor the birthdate on my card with a pencil so I could buy cheap cocktails. This story sounds like a wee fairy tale from the 20th century, but it is deeply relevant to current…

Book Cat Tales: A history Jerry D. Moore Thames & Hudson OVER the course of a weekend, I once saw one of my family’s cats, a Byronic individual named Solomon, maul my sister under the guise of play, throw up on my bedsheets and polish off a goldcrest before my bird-loving father’s eyes. Yet we forgave Solomon, because there is nothing we would begrudge him or his sister. Such is the cognitive dissonance of cat lovers. House cats (Felis catus) are among the most popular pets in the world. But it is unclear why people sought to domesticate them – if they can be said to have been domesticated at all. How did we come to love them in all their forms, especially when so many species across history have…

Editor’s pick The long history of superluminal motion 27 September, p 34 From Peter Holness, Hertford, UK I have read your fascinating article on the phenomenon of superluminal shadows in astronomical contexts. It is truly captivating to explore these cosmic curiosities. However, I would like to point out that apparent superluminal motion isn’t just confined to the depths of space. Engineering equipment capable of demonstrating similar effects on Earth has been around for decades. For instance, with an old cathode ray oscilloscope, once considered cutting-edge, you would often see the illuminated spot on the screen travel at speeds that appeared to exceed the velocity of light, due to its extremely fast horizontal sweeping. The key term here is “apparent”. Nothing physical is travelling faster than light, of course. The spot…

IT ALL started one summer lunchtime in 1992 on the terrace outside the CERN cafeteria. If you had happened to be there at the physics research lab near Geneva at the time, you might have overheard conversations about the enormous new particle accelerator being planned – a machine that would become known as the Large Hadron Collider – or about a fledgling information-sharing project, the World Wide Web, which had launched a few months earlier. But on this particular day, there was also an argument going on among three physicists. There was Gabriele Veneziano, the Italian who helped invent string theory; Lev Okun, the Soviet scientist who coined the term “hadron” to refer to particles made of quarks; and Michael Duff, a British theorist who had been instrumental in developing…

ALMOST two years ago, at the COP28 climate summit in the heart of the United Arab Emirates petrostate, governments pledged to start “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems” in a bid to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Since then, the share of energy generated by fossil fuels globally has remained stubbornly above 80 per cent, as indeed it has done for decades. As a result of our failure to decarbonise, researchers now believe we have triggered the first of Earth’s “tipping points” – moments where we have changed the climate so extensively that it can never fully recover. Ocean water is now so warm that the world’s coral reefs are at risk of extensive dieback (see page 9). What is holding up the energy transition? This question has…

THERAPIES that alter the behaviour of people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) may be more effective than standard treatments. IBS commonly results in bloating, diarrhoea, constipation and abdominal pain. While its causes are unclear, disordered gut-brain signalling is thought to play a major role. Gut infections or certain foods may trigger the gastrointestinal tract to send alarm signals to the brain, while psychological stress can send them the other way, hence why people with IBS are encouraged to find ways to relax. As somewhat of a last resort, doctors often turn to behavioural therapies, which a 2020 review suggested may be more effective than routine care. These can include cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which helps people change how they think and act to manage their symptoms, and gut-directed hypnotherapy, where people…

RESEARCHERS have taken control of a previously elusive material behaviour, similar to magnetism, that could be used to build better hard drives in the future. If you place a bar magnet in a magnetic field, it will rotate under the field’s influence, but a material that has a property called ferroaxiality remains unmoved in every field that physicists know of. Now, Zhiyang Zeng at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Germany and his colleagues have figured out how to control ferroaxiality with a laser. You can think of common magnetic materials as made of many tiny bar magnets. Zeng says that for ferroaxial materials, it is more accurate to imagine a collection of dipoles – two opposite electric charges separated by a small distance –…

IN THE 64 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, fewer than 700 people have followed him. But space flight becomes more affordable and accessible every year, and that number is set to rise dramatically. James Bluemel’s new book Once Upon a Time in Space recounts the space race so far in photographs, released to accompany his BBC documentary of the same name. It features images from astronauts’ collections and NASA archives, and stories from astronauts, scientists, engineers and space tourists alike. “To see our planet from space affects everyone that has had that opportunity,” says Bluemel. “Uniformly, astronauts and cosmonauts are filled with an admiration of the beauty of our planet, the swirling blues and whites set against the dark void of space. I think some…

Alison Flood Culture editor London I have a penchant for old sci-fi with trashy covers so terrible they are brilliant. My dream is that someone creates a wallpaper of them so I can use it to paper my downstairs bathroom. In the meantime, I recently came across a book in a charity shop I ended up loving: Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass. This was published in 1989; the edition I found (below) is from the 1990s, and has a pleasingly weird jacket. It also turned out to be a great read, of the dense, “messagey”, 1980s sci-fi sort. It’s set in a far future in which humanity has settled many planets. A plague might wipe them out, unless they discover why the inhabitants of a world called Grass, covered in multicoloured…

I AM standing in the bathroom with a strip of litmus paper in my hand. I am going to pee on it and hope that it doesn’t turn red, which would indicate acid. This isn’t for a bet – it is a (ahem) litmus test of whether my diet is slowly killing me. Acidic urine is a crude sign that something called my dietary acid load is too high. If it is, I am opening myself up to a range of ills. Luckily, there is a simple cure: a change of diet. So, if I do see red, I am going to eat some spinach and try again. This might sound like medical woo-woo, and there are worrying echoes of a discredited fad called the alkaline diet. But nutrition scientists…

6.6743 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2 The gravitational constant, G, which describes how much a given amount of mass deforms space-time. Known as “big G”, it is used to calculate the strength of the force of gravity between masses. 6.62607015 × 10-34 kg m2 s-1 Planck’s constant, h, a crucial number that allows us to calculate the energy of quantum particles, such as photons. 299,792,458 m s-1 The speed of light in a vacuum, c. This constant can also be thought of as a kind of universal speed limit, as there is no form of matter, energy or information that can ever travel faster than this.…

A NEW imaging technique has revealed a previously unexplored ecosystem within the ovary that may influence how fast human eggs age. The discovery could open new possibilities for slowing ovarian ageing, preserving fertility and improving health after menopause. Women are born with millions of immature eggs, one of which fully matures each month after puberty. From their late 20s, however, fertility falls sharply – a decline long attributed to dwindling egg number and quality. To better understand what drives this decline, Eliza Gaylord at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues developed a 3D imaging technique that lets researchers visualise eggs without slicing the ovary into thin layers, the standard approach. These images showed that eggs aren’t evenly distributed, as we thought, but cluster in pockets, which suggests…

A BLACK hole that was eaten by a star seems to have gotten revenge by consuming the star from the inside, producing a gamma-ray burst spotted about 9 billion light years from Earth. The burst, called GRB 250702B, was first spotted by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in July. Such bursts are bright flashes caused by jets fired out from energetic events, such as massive stars collapsing into black holes, and they usually last for a few minutes. GRB 250702B, however, lasted for 25,000 seconds – or about 7 hours – making it the longest-known gamma-ray burst. Scientists had struggled to explain it, but Eliza Neights at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in the US and her colleagues now suggest an unusual and rare possibility. “The only [model] which naturally explains…

UNEXPECTEDLY violent black holes may explain why some matter in the universe seemed to have been missing. Most of the universe is filled with mysterious dark matter, but even ordinary matter has stumped cosmologists. Some of this normal matter – made up of particles called baryons – seemed to have been missing for a long time. Researchers recently worked out where it was hiding (arXiv, doi.org/p8qd), and now Boryana Hadzhiyska at the University of California, Berkeley and her colleagues have learned how black holes may have shaped its distribution and kept it hidden. “Black holes at the centre of galaxies are ejecting matter in a surprisingly violent way” “Matter consists of dark matter, which is the predominant component, and baryonic matter or, essentially, gas. For that gas, only about a…

WORKING memory chips just 10 atoms thick could lead to radically larger storage capacity in electronic devices like smartphones. After decades of miniaturisation, current computer chips often cram tens of billions of transistors into an area the size of a fingernail. But while the size of components on a silicon wafer has become extremely small, the wafers themselves remain relatively thick – meaning there are limits to how much you can increase chip complexity by stacking multiple layers together. Scientists have been working on thinner chips made from so-called 2D materials such as graphene, which is formed of a single layer of carbon atoms and is theoretically as thin as a material can be. But until now, only simple chip designs could be constructed with such materials, and it has…

Film Frankenstein Directed by Guillermo del Toro Out now in select UK and US cinemas, streaming on Netflix from 7 November GUILLERMO DEL TORO has long been fascinated by the borderlands where science, myth and monstrosity meet. In his new film, Frankenstein, he turns at last to Mary Shelley’s foundational text: the 1818 novel that many argue gave birth to both science fiction and modern horror. The result is visually sumptuous, performed with intensity and, at times, philosophically acute – even if its pacing and some design choices betray the heavy hand of Netflix, the film’s financier. Shelley’s story of Victor Frankenstein – a brilliant but reckless scientist who dares to bring dead matter to life – remains one of the most potent cautionary tales about the promise and peril…

THE latest novel by Ken Liu, All That We See or Seem, is the near-future story of the mysterious disappearance of a professional dream-weaver called Elli. It is being marketed as a cyberpunk thriller. Full disclosure: I don’t generally seek out thrillers or cyberpunk books, so I may not be the target audience for this. But I was keen to read it because Liu has not one but two claims to fame: as well as being the author of a celebrated fantasy series called The Dandelion Dynasty, he is also the translator of the sensationally good Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Cixin Liu. And so, to Ken Liu’s version of our near future. In the world we find ourselves in, personal artificial intelligences are ubiquitous and Elli makes a…

IF you’ve ever stepped outside to find your newly planted flowerbeds dug up or your vegetable patch ravaged, you will know my pain. From curious foxes to marauding squirrels, the destruction wrought by garden mammals on lovingly nurtured plants can be enough to test the patience of even the most mild-mannered gardener. Hence why garden centres are packed with everything from ultrasonic devices triggered by motion sensors to creepy steel traps and even packets of dried lion droppings, all in an effort to protect your precious plants. But what if there were a cheaper, easier, kinder option that might already be on your spice rack: chilli powder. Is this popular garden remedy too good to be true? The idea is simple – garden mammals react to capsaicin, the spicy chemical…

Our expiry date Bad news, everyone: our cards are marked. The human species will go extinct by the year 2339, so we have just a few centuries left (at time of writing). News editor Jacob Aron shared this shattering revelation with us, which he spotted in a non-peer-reviewed paper on the social sciences preprint server SocArXiv. In it, demographers David Swanson and Jeff Tayman outline how the human population will go from its current 8.1 billion to zero. Their argument is quite simple. “Given the decline in fertility between 2019 and 2024 and employing a probabilistic forecasting method,” they write, “by 2139 the world population will be between 1.55 billion and 1.81 billion… by 2339 there will be no humans.” Swanson and Tayman note that this extinction date is “only…