Adult mice used their paws and mouths to remove pups stuck in a pregnant female’s birth canal Violet J. Ivan/NYU Grossman School of Medicine Mice seem to assist pregnant females when they get into difficulty giving birth, with experienced mothers being the most helpful. This is thought to be the first official sighting of such…
Tablets could offer a more convenient way to take weight-loss drugs H_Ko/Shutterstock A daily pill could soon be available as an alternative to Wegovy and Ozempic injections after a trial found it led to substantial weight loss and improved blood sugar levels in people with obesity and type 2 diabetes. Orforglipron, developed by pharmaceutical company…
Understanding how losing the Y chromosome affects treatment outcomes in lung cancer could guide therapy decisions da-kuk/Getty Images Men with the most common form of lung cancer seem to be uniquely susceptible to losing the Y chromosome from their cells, which could have advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it shields their tumours from…
Scaffolds like these are used to give structure to 3D-printed organs Tristan Fewings/Getty Images Replaceable YouMary Roach, Oneworld Publications (UK); W. W. Norton (US) Our bodies are made of many squishy, hard and intricate parts. When these fail – or fall short of our expectations – what are we to do? Medicine offers some solutions,…
Credit: Kirsty Pargeter/Alamy Jelly belly. Thunder thighs. Muffin top. When it comes to our wobbly bits, we aren’t short of derogatory terminology. Many societies tend to view fat as an inert padding that keeps us warm at best, if not a simple nuisance to be rid of. But it is time to reshape that thinking.…
“Plants have neither ears nor brains, so they can’t appreciate music as we do…” Credit: Michele Cornelius/Alamy Do you play music to your plants? As a botanist obsessed with collecting houseplants, I get asked this question all the time. This New Age notion first entered popular culture back in the 1960s, complete with psychedelic “music…
“Wearing the unsmart glasses created an entirely un-augmented reality…” Ekaterina Goncharova/Getty Images By the mid-2020s, the world was becoming swamped with “AI slop”. Whether images, video, music, emails, ads, speeches or TV shows, many people’s interactions were with asinine content generated by artificial intelligence. Sometimes the experience was fun and relatively harmless, but often it…
ELAINE KNOX If, like me, you live in the UK, you have probably noticed something: there are more and more sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and similar types of large cars on the streets. These accounted for a huge 63 per cent of new car sales in the UK last year, up from 12 per cent…
Quantum 2.0 visits the edges of our knowledge about the quantum world RICHARD KAIL/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Quantum 2.0Paul Davies, Penguin (UK, out 27th November); University of Chicago Press (US, out February 2026) Physicist Paul Davies’s Quantum 2.0: The past, present and future of quantum physics ends on a beautiful note. “To be aware of the…
Illustration of Faraday’s experiment showing how light becomes polarised by a magnetic field ENRIQUE SAHAGÚN In 1845, physicist Michael Faraday provided the first direct evidence that electromagnetism and light are related. Now, it turns out that this connection is even stronger than Faraday imagined. In his experiment, Faraday shone light through a piece of glass which…