A false-colour X-ray showing a large neural tube defect (red) on both sides of the lower back in someone with spina bifida SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A patch made of stem cells from donor placentas has been used to treat fetuses in the womb with a severe form of spina bifida as part of a world-first…
UK lawmakers are proposing to restrict children’s use of social media George Chan/Getty Images A proposed new law banning children in the UK from using social media and virtual private networks (VPNs) would frustrate adults and erode their privacy, as they will have to verify their age to use a host of everyday sites and…
Model of a Neanderthal man at the Natural History Museum in London Mike Kemp/In Pictures/Getty Images When our species and Neanderthals interbred, it may have been mostly female Homo sapiens and male Neanderthals that mated. That’s the conclusion of a study of the genetic traces left in both populations by the intermixing. It isn’t clear…
Geothermal power plant at United Downs in Cornwall, UK Thomas Frost Photography/Geothermal Engineering Limited The UK’s electricity grid has started getting its first geothermal power amid a worldwide resurgence of interest in geothermal, thanks to improving well technologies and rising power demand from data centres. The United Downs plant in Cornwall will generate 3 megawatts…
Every few years, the planets appear in a line Getty Images Nearly all of the planets in the solar system are about to march through the night sky in a single-file line. This planetary alignment, sometimes called a planet parade, will include all of the solar system’s planets except Mars, as it is currently on…
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images Mas Subramanian accompanies his wife, Rajeevi, to art museums all over the world. But, until fairly recently, he rarely lingered over the paintings. While she could spend hours with Monets and Picassos, he was content to pass the time with a book instead. “You go and see everything,” he…
Reconstruction of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis Gabriel Díaz Yantén, Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. An almost-complete skeleton of a dinosaur that weighed less than a small chicken has provided new insights into the evolution of alvarezsaurs, which are among the smallest dinosaurs that ever lived. The 95-million-year-old fossil of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis was found at the La Buitrera…
SpaceX wants to launch many more satellites Charles Boyer / Alamy Stock Photo Astronomers are scrambling to work out the environmental impact of a SpaceX application to launch 1 million satellites, as the deadline for its approval fast approaches. On 30 January, SpaceX announced it had applied to send a vast mega-constellation of 1 million…
Quantum computers can theoretically crack common encryption methods BlackJack3D/Getty Images The amount of quantum computing power needed to crack a common data encryption technique has been reduced tenfold. This makes the encryption method even more vulnerable to quantum computers, which may be able to reach the reduced size within the decade. The RSA algorithm is…
Artificial intelligences opt for nuclear weapons surprisingly often Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises. Kenneth Payne at King’s College London set three leading large language models – GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash – against…
