Science

In this extract from the award-winning science fiction novel Annie Bot, the January read for the New Scientist Book Club, we are introduced to Sierra Greer's protagonist, a sex robot called Annie

A woman's body has been found to consist of varying proportions of male and female cells because of an extremely rare form of chimerism

Scientists are uncovering new clues that a cosmic explosion may have rocked Earth at the end of the last ice age. At major Clovis-era sites, researchers found shocked quartz—evidence of intense heat and pressure consistent with a comet airburst rather than volcanism or human activity. The event could have sparked massive fires, blocked sunlight, and triggered a rapid return to ice-age conditions. These harsh changes may explain the sudden loss of megafauna and the disappearance of the Clovis culture.

The Atacama Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), the world's most powerful radio telescope, has received 145 new low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) that will increase its range and sensitivity.

A new advance in bromine-based flow batteries could remove one of the biggest obstacles to long-lasting, affordable energy storage. Scientists developed a way to chemically capture corrosive bromine during battery operation, keeping its concentration extremely low while boosting energy density through a two-electron reaction. This approach sharply reduces damage to battery components and allows the use of cheaper materials.

Astronomers tracking a nearby star system thought they had spotted an exoplanet reflecting light from its star. Then it vanished. Even stranger, another bright object appeared nearby. After studying years of Hubble Space Telescope data, scientists realized they were not seeing planets at all, but the glowing debris left behind by two massive collisions between asteroid-sized bodies.

For the first time, astronomers have caught a stellar nursery in the act of blowing giant celestial bubbles, revealing a massive outflow of gas stretching over 650 light-years from one of the Milky Way’s most extraordinary star clusters. Using nearly two decades of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, researchers traced this budding stream of supercharged particles as it expands beneath our Galaxy’s disk, offering crucial insights into how young, massive stars shape galactic evolution.

Lunar dust poses one of the most persistent challenges for spacecraft operations on the Moon, clinging stubbornly to surfaces and infiltrating equipment with potentially devastating consequences. Now, researchers have developed a comprehensive mathematical model that reveals exactly how electrically charged dust particles behave when they collide with spacecraft at low speeds, uncovering surprising insights about what makes them stick and what allows them to bounce away.

Astronomers have measured water streaming from interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS for the first time since it passed closest to the Sun. Using a spacecraft that’s been watching the Sun for nearly three decades, scientists detected hydrogen glowing around the comet and calculated that it was producing water at extraordinary rates. These measurements not only confirm that interstellar comets behave remarkably like our own Solar System’s icy wanderers, but also provide crucial clues about what comets looked like in the early universe.

Researchers have confirmed the mass of a free-floating planet thanks to a lucky convergence of ground- and space-based telescopes

Chess960 involves shuffling the pieces at the back of the board, and an analysis suggests doing so can increase the complexity of the game to favour white, black or neither player

A newly discovered exoplanet is rewriting the rules of what planets can be. Orbiting a city-sized neutron star, this Jupiter-mass world has a bizarre carbon-rich atmosphere filled with soot clouds and possibly diamonds at its core. Its extreme gravity stretches it into a lemon shape, and it completes a full orbit in under eight hours. Scientists are stunned — no known theory explains how such a planet could exist.

We start the new year with clouds, which, though some say they’re loaded with bacteria (and created by the bacteria as a means of dispersal), we’ll consider nonliving atmospheric phenomena.  This montage could be called, “I’ve looked at clouds that way,” and comes from reader David Jorling in Oregon.  David’s captions are indented, and the photos can be enlarged by clicking on them.

First of all here is an overly simple chart that I used to identify the clouds: UCAR/L.S. Gardiner

 

As to these three photos, the first was taken at Mary S Young State Park while I was walking my dog.  These are “cirrus” clouds which, as I understand it, means there are strong winds in the upper atmosphere:

As to the following two pictures, which were taken from my yard amongs the Douglas Fir Trees.  My best guess (and perhaps one of your readers has more expertise is that these are a mixture of cirrostratus and cirrocumulus clouds.  perhaps in a state of transition:

More pictures taken from my yard. Again my best guess as is cirrrostratus clouds:

Perhaps these are in transition from cirrostratus to cirrus:

My suspicious is that these are Cirrostratus transitioning to cirrus:

This one was taken at sunset near Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood. They may have appeared lower perhaps because I was at about 6000 feet elevation instead of about 300 feet where I live. So my suspicion is that these are either cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds:

This is a picture from my yard toward some neighboring Douglas Firs and assorted evergreens.  I suspect these are cirrocumulus clouds:

 

This is a picture I took from my car during a nationally forecast “Atmospheric River”. (In Oregon we call it “Rain”.) The picture was taken westbound on the Ross Island Bridge.  The building above the Stratocumulus cloud (in Oregon we call it a “Fog Bank”) is one of the buildings of the Oregon Health Sciences University, which is the main medical school in Oregon:

Olivia Remes, a mental health researcher at the University of Cambridge, says these are the three things everyone should do this New Year to cultivate a more positive mindset

It's the responsibility of our medical establishment to protect the vulnerable and keep schools open.

The post The Murray Hill Declaration first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A philosopher at the University of Cambridge says there’s no reliable way to know whether AI is conscious—and that may remain true for the foreseeable future. According to Dr. Tom McClelland, consciousness alone isn’t the ethical tipping point anyway; sentience, the capacity to feel good or bad, is what truly matters. He argues that claims of conscious AI are often more marketing than science, and that believing in machine minds too easily could cause real harm. The safest stance for now, he says, is honest uncertainty.

ESA’s Gaia space telescope has achieved something astronomers thought nearly impossible, detecting planets while they’re still forming inside the dusty discs surrounding newborn stars. By measuring the subtle gravitational wobbles that unseen companions induce on their host stars, Gaia has found hints of planets, brown dwarfs, and companion stars in 31 young stellar systems out of 98 surveyed.

The Champagne Cluster is a rare and beautiful example of two galaxy clusters smashing together. Its festive name comes from both its New Year’s Eve discovery and its bubbly appearance in space. Images reveal superheated gas and galaxies spread across a massive collision zone. Astronomers believe this system could help explain how dark matter responds when giant structures collide.

The iconic 2019 and 2022 photographs of black holes M87* and Sagittarius A* captivated astronomers worldwide with their fuzzy orange doughnut shapes. Now, scientists are preparing to take the next giant leap by creating the first ever 3D movies of black holes that could fundamentally reshape our understanding of gravity and the universe’s most violent phenomena.

Two spiral galaxies locked in a slow motion collision have been captured in stunning detail by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The pair grazed past each other millions of years ago, triggering spectacular waves of star formation and distorting their elegant spiral arms into sweeping silver blue streamers. This celestial dance, playing out over hundreds of millions of years, offers astronomers a rare glimpse into the violent yet creative process that shapes galaxies across the universe.