Table of contents for 10 January 2026 in New Scientist

JELLYFISH seem to sleep for about 8 hours a day and snooze more after a bad night’s sleep – just like us. “It’s funny: just like humans, they spend about a third of their time asleep,” says Lior Appelbaum at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. In animals with brains, such as mammals, sleep is crucial for things like clearing metabolic waste. But it was unclear why sleep evolved in jellyfish, which belong to a group of brainless animals called cnidarians, in which neurons – arranged in a relatively simple network across the body – are thought to have first evolved. Appelbaum and his colleagues used cameras to record Cassiopea andromeda, a species of upside-down jellyfish, in tanks for 24 hours. The jellyfish, which usually sit tentacles-up in shallow waters…

NOTORIOUSLY ghostly particles called neutrinos may have revealed a crack in our understanding of all the particles and forces in the universe. The standard model of particle physics, which catalogues all the particles and forces we know to exist, is one of the biggest successes of modern physics, but physicists have also spent decades trying to break it. That is because it has enough flaws – notably, it doesn’t connect gravity to any of the three other fundamental forces – for researchers to suspect that they must formulate another, better model. If the standard model cracks under a stress test, that would point to where we should start building this next model. Francesca Dordei at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Cagliari and her colleagues have now…

REACHING net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in the US will require not only the “carrots” of green subsidies but also the “sticks” of carbon taxes. The most effective way to reduce carbon emissions is putting some kind of price or tax on them. But the US government has repeatedly failed to pass cap-and-trade legislation, which would cap emissions and require companies over that cap to buy allowances. Subsidies, however, are easier to adopt and can bring down the cost of low-emission technologies like electric vehicles. Wei Peng at Princeton University and her colleagues modelled the impact of subsidies, taxes and various timings of both to determine the best sequence of policies for reducing US emissions. While subsidies could reduce energy system emissions by 32 per cent before 2030, their…

THE El Niño weather phenomenon, which influences the climate and economies in regions bordering the Pacific Ocean today, also caused famines in Europe between 1500 and 1800. During El Niño periods, ocean waters in the central and eastern Pacific become warmer, disrupting trade winds and leading to changes in rainfall patterns around the globe. When waters cool in the same area of the Pacific, it is called La Niña, and these swings between warm and cool ocean phases are known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The phenomenon has severe impacts on tropical and subtropical regions – especially in Australasia, where it leads to drier weather and often brings droughts and bushfires, and the Americas, where precipitation increases, sometimes catastrophically. But until now, little scientific attention has been paid to…

IN THE endless white expanse, a small mound broke the horizon. As explorer Matthieu Tordeur and glaciologist Heïdi Sevestre skied towards it, they saw a golden head emerging from the snow. It was the bust of Vladimir Lenin left by a Soviet expedition at the southern pole of inaccessibility, the point in Antarctica furthest from any coast. This surreal experience was the first milestone of a 4000-kilometre expedition across the continent to collect data that could shed light on its future in a warming world. “I almost had tears in my eyes,” says Sevestre, speaking to New Scientist by satellite phone from Antarctica. “We felt really humble, really, really small, and it was quite something to see lonely Lenin here just in the middle of nowhere.” Since 3 November, the…

I AM a nature writer. I like to think that I have a fairly solid sort of relationship with the more-than-human world: I watch birds, I pick up frogs, I help my kids find beetles under logs. I think nature is complicated and marvellous. Sometimes I think it is beautiful. But never once in my life have I considered it sacred, and never once would it have occurred to me to consider my relationship with nature to be “spiritual”. Current trends suggest that I am missing something. “Nature connectedness” is a wishy-washy term, but it is supported by a sturdy (and expanding) academic substrate. The authors of a 2025 study make the troubling claim that higher levels of “nature connectedness”, or “a sense of oneness with nature”, are associated with…

NEW Year is a time of reinvention. In that spirit, I would like to shake up this preview of 2026’s best sci-fi and science-related TV with a radical act: including a series that started last year. That may seem strange, but the second season of Fallout (Amazon Prime Video) aired in only mid-December, so, for my money, it counts. Set in a retrofuturistic US, generations of humans have lived inside radiation-proof bunkers sold to them by the shadowy Vault-Tec corporation. Last season, former vault-dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell) went surface-side to find her missing father, encountering cowboys and cannibals along the way. Now, she’s on a new quest, accompanied by The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), an irradiated gunslinger with red skin and no nose. What could be more fun? The must-watch Fallout…

Doughnut holes Black holes are depicted as having doughnut-shaped discs around them, and space telescope images seem to support this. Do they somehow have this shape when viewed in all directions? Andy Lawrence University of Edinburgh, UK We only have actual pictures of two black holes, taken using the Earth-sized Event Horizon Telescope. These images look like doughnuts seen face-on, with a central hole, but the discs aren’t really doughnut-shaped. They look that way because the super-strong gravity near the black hole bends the light right round in a circle, leaving a dark central patch. That distortion means it would look that way from whichever direction you looked at it. However, we believe that most giant black holes are surrounded by a much larger, roughly doughnut-shaped, disc of dusty muck.…

A LONG-RUNNING and bitterly fought dispute over whether Sahelanthropus tchadensis, the earliest known hominin, had a knuckle-walking gait, like chimpanzees, or walked upright, like humans, may have been settled – but not everyone is convinced. Scott Williams at New York University and his colleagues say that reanalysis of fossil remains of S. tchadensis shows it had at least three key anatomical features that together demonstrate that it was our earliest known hominin ancestor to be bipedal. It has, however, been a lengthy journey to reach this point. The 7-million-year-old fossil skull, teeth and a jawbone were first described in 2002, following their discovery in the desert region of Chad. With a pronounced brow ridge and small canines, the ancient animal was immediately recognised as being unlike great apes. The anatomy…

THE forensic examination of a murder victim has revealed that she had chimerism – meaning her body contained cells that were genetically distinct, as if they came from two different individuals. In this case, the anonymous woman had varying proportions of male and female cells in different tissues. The most likely explanation for this is that she developed from a single egg that was fertilised by two sperm − one carrying an X chromosome and the other a Y, biologists told New Scientist. “This is a fascinating case, but not completely unprecedented,” says David Haig at Harvard University. There are occasionally visible signs of chimerism, as with the singer Taylor Muhl, who has highlighted her chimerism to raise awareness of the condition. More often, however, it is revealed only by…

HOW much of our genome really matters? Some argue that because most of our DNA is active, it must be doing something important. Others say even random DNA would be highly active. This has now been put to the test by studying human cells containing massive chunks of plant DNA, New Scientist can exclusively reveal – and the effectively random plant DNA was indeed nearly as active as human DNA. The finding shows that a high proportion of genome activity is just noise, rather than having any purpose, and thus adds to the evidence that most of the human genome is junk. “A large amount can simply be explained by background noise,” says Brett Adey at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. “This seems to be broadly consistent with…

WHAT makes quantum computers so powerful? A new experiment shows the property of “quantum contextuality” could play a part. Quantum computers harness uniquely quantum phenomena absent from conventional devices. For instance, their building blocks, called qubits, are routinely put into superposition states – assuming two properties at once that are normally mutually exclusive. Now, researchers at Google Quantum AI have used their Willow quantum computer to carry out several demonstrations showing that the property of quantum contextuality also plays a significant role. Quantum contextuality captures an oddity about measuring the properties of quantum objects. While the colour of a pen, say, isn’t affected by whether you measure it before or after measuring its length, for a quantum object, the results of measurements can’t be treated as pre-existing properties that are…

ON THE spectrum. These three words have become synonymous with autism, yet behind them lies a common misunderstanding. The idea of “the spectrum” suggests that all autistic people share similar experiences and behave in similar ways – only to a greater or lesser extent. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Some autistic people may not speak at all; others are hyperverbal and extremely fluent. Some are highly sensitive to bright lights and noise, or the opposite. And some have rigid routines and make repetitive movements like hand-flapping, while others are more flexible but spend a lot of time on “special interests” – anything from Tudor history to Rubik’s cubes. Autism’s diversity is something to celebrate. However, it has long presented an immense challenge to researchers trying to understand…

WE TEND to think of time as scarce, or unruly – either racing away from us or dragging by painfully slowly. As the years pass, it can feel like time is slipping by faster than ever. Thankfully, psychological research is beginning to show how we can reshape our experience of time to make it feel more abundant when we want it to, just with a few simple tweaks to our daily routine. New Scientist spoke to Ian Taylor at Loughborough University, UK, author of Time Hacks: The psychology of time and how to spend it, to explore why rethinking our relationship with time could help us feel less pressured, less bored and more fulfilled at the end of the day. Helen Thomson: It’s normally physicists who deal with the definition…

CHESS can be improved by rearranging the positions of the starting pieces to produce a more difficult or fairer game, a physicist has found. A standard game of chess always starts with the pieces at the back of the board arranged with an element of symmetry. Starting from the outside, for both white and black, are pairs of rooks, knights and bishops, with a king and queen in the middle. But because this arrangement is fixed, top chess players can memorise the best moves to open a game of chess, which can lead to predictable matches. In the 1990s, the late chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer proposed a variant of the game, called Chess960, that reduced this reliance on memory. Fischer suggested effectively randomising the starting positions of the pieces at…

IN 2007, Ali Nesin set out to solve a mathematics problem by building a village. Nesin, a Turkish mathematician, had noticed that even students who came to his Istanbul Bilgi University classroom from Turkey’s most elite schools were struggling with maths. Instead of thinking critically, they were memorising formulas and approaching their education with a troubling passivity, Nesin concluded. He decided to do something about it, eventually getting a literal village – the Nesin Mathematics Village, in western Turkey – off the ground. Photographer Piero Castellano recently captured Nesin teaching there. In the middle-bottom photograph, Nesin’s eyes are fixed on a blackboard set against a tree, some leafy vines, a stone floor and a stone wall. Castellano says that the tree, the vines and the stones are crucial to Nesin’s…

WELL, those little green shoots of recovery I forecast last year have flowered. This year is set to bring tighter scripts, cheaper projects (which is good, because studios can take more chances) and a more enjoyable cinema-going experience all round. On 16 January, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will deliver (honest) on all those promises exasperatingly kept back in 2025’s 28 Years Later. There will be Cillian Murphy reprising his role from 2002’s 28 Days Later, plus more from actor Jack O’Connell’s “Jimmys”, an acrobatic killer cult. There will also be Nia DaCosta in the director’s chair – a young, much-lauded talent who not so long ago had the misfortune to helm The Marvels. A film written by Alex Garland is just what DaCosta needs for a proper career…

ARIF PUJIANTO couldn’t sleep. All day, he had watched the waves rising from the nearby shoreline. When dawn broke, the water had risen further, and the area where he lives on the low-lying Pari Island in Indonesia was devastated: rubbish strewn everywhere, the walls of his home collapsing, the family’s drinking well polluted with salt water. Since that night in December 2021, the tidal floods have returned dozens of times, making life almost impossible. “I feel angry and afraid,” says Pujianto. “If Pari Island sinks, where will we live?” Eventually, he decided to do something about it. Pujianto is one of four residents of the island who have filed a lawsuit against cement manufacturer Holcim, demanding compensation for harms like these. At first blush, this might seem outlandish. After all,…

Quick crossword #199 Set by Richard Smyth Scribble zone Cryptic crossword next week ACROSS 5 Cerebrovascular accident (6) 7 North American songbird (8) 9 South American snake (8) 10 Ni (6) 11 2014 sci-fi film by Christopher Nolan (12) 13 Inventor’s legal protection (6) 15 Rectangular array of numbers (6) 18 Expert in poisons (12) 21 N (6) 22 Å (8) 23 Send, broadcast (8) 24 Marine bivalve (6) DOWN 1 Composite building material (8) 2 ___ elbow, lateral epicondylitis (6) 3 Tissue fold that secures an organ (8) 4 Crab claw, for example (6) 6 Woodwork tool (5,3) 7 Impact hole (6) 8 Some, not many (1,3) 12 Phase of the cardiac cycle (8) 14 Biological organisation (8) 16 Narrowest; most restrictive (8) 17 Eighth of a circle (6)…