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King's College London

King's College London is a public research university in London, one of the UK's leading institutions for teaching, research and medicine.

Known aliases

  • Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience
  • KCL
  • King's
  • King's College
  • King's College in London
  • King's College London

Current stories

scienceOne report1 publisher

Franklin worked out DNA helix features from a flawed X-ray before Photo 51, archive study says

King's College London and Science History Institute researchers say Franklin calculated DNA helix features from Photo 49 before Photo 51. Their archival study challenges the long-held belief that she did not recognize what Photo 51 showed.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Cancer rates in under-50s rise across seven tumour types in England, WCRF analysis finds

World Cancer Research Fund found rises in seven early-onset cancer types in England, with under-50 prostate rates up 3.6-fold since 2001. The absolute rates remain small, so the data's strongest case is for research into what is driving the increase.

Publishers:theguardian.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives35
Confidence58
scienceOne report1 publisher

OpenAI's Lean code for its Navier-Stokes proof loosens a bound set in the written paper

Cambridge and King's College London mathematicians say the Lean code for OpenAI's Navier-Stokes proof states a weaker step than the written paper. Both proofs may hold up, but Lean verifies only the code it is given, so a person still has to check that the code matches the text.

Publishers:newscientist.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+35
Incentives40
Confidence60
scienceOne report1 publisher

Rebuilt car window-tint meter reads leaf water in seconds for about £140

King's College London researchers turned a car window-tint meter into a £140 leaf-water sensor that explained at least 81% of variation across six species. The authors say each species needs its own calibration and readings weaken on badly dried leaves, limits that bite hardest in wildfire work.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+30
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Archival records show Rosalind Franklin shot Photograph 51 deliberately as a showpiece for publication

Rosalind Franklin began Photograph 51 the day she saw Photograph 49, as a sharper exposure for publication, Alistair Sponsel and Brian Sutton report. Her notes on the earlier image record a possible helix, evidence against the long-told story that she misread her own data.

Publishers:livescience.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+30
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Most ecosystem benefits keep climbing with biodiversity across 423 pooled studies

Researchers at King's College London and Imperial College London pooled 423 studies and found most of 23 ecosystem benefits rise steadily with diversity. Species appear to stand in for one another less than ecologists assumed, so even small losses tend to cut what ecosystems provide.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Document trail ties at least 47 Russian and Belarusian figures to Ukrainian child deportations

Researchers with the Where Are Our People? project have identified at least 47 Russian and Belarusian figures in the deportation of Ukrainian children. Only some of them face Western sanctions, while Ukraine counts 2,644 children returned against 20,651 verified deportations.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+10
Incentives55
Confidence40
scienceOne report1 publisher

Pomegranate metabolite urolithin A improved heart function in male mice with stiff hearts by up to 80 percent

King's College London researchers say urolithin A, a gut-bacteria product of pomegranates, improved heart function in mice by up to 80 percent. It points to a new route for treating a common, hard-to-treat heart failure, though so far only in animals and lab-grown tissue.

Publishers:sciencealert.com

Reality

Evidence40
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives30
Confidence45
scienceOne report1 publisher

Children who walked more at 11 and 12 had fewer anxiety and depression symptoms a year later

King's College London researchers linked more daily steps in 5,515 US adolescents to fewer anxiety and depression symptoms a year later. The study is observational, so step counts become a cheap marker to track, though it cannot yet show that adding steps lowers symptoms.

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+45
Incentives40
Confidence50
scienceOne report1 publisher

Daniel Tant's partial key let GPT-6 Astra decode an 1809 Napoleonic cipher letter

Carter Church used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to decode an 1809 Napoleonic cipher letter in six hours from one prompt and one scan. Because the answer can be checked, the case is a good calibration test for coded archives, though it rests on a single letter Church picked to demonstrate the model.

Publishers:livescience.com

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption8
Hype gap+35
Incentives40
Confidence50
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Drudge, Huffington and Breitbart shaped online news through identity, myth and audience, study finds

Ashlee Humphreys and Gillian Brooks drew on nearly 100 interviews to trace how Drudge, Huffington and Breitbart became the person brands of online news. All three cases succeeded, so the study shows how founders helped write a young market's rules and leaves open whether the same combination predicts success.

Reality

Evidence40
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives45
Confidence45
scienceOne report1 publisher

Cannabis use tracks with committing violence and suffering it across 63 pooled studies

King's College London researchers pooled 63 studies of 265,000-plus people and found general-population cannabis users twice as likely to commit violence. The authors stop at association, so the finding supports flagging cannabis in violence risk checks and leaves causation open.

Publishers:sciencedaily.com

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+12
Incentives25
Confidence55
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Firms that adopt AI are adding senior staff while their junior ranks shrink

Stanford and King's College London researchers found senior roles at AI-adopting firms grew 6.7% over five years while junior roles fell 3%. Junior development is now a leadership decision, made on evidence that so far amounts to a newsletter summary of one paper.

Publishers:charterworks.com

Reality

Evidence30
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence35
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Conspiracy theorists are cutting down the sensors that time UK traffic lights

Attacks on the detector units mounted above signal heads have been reported in Devon, Cambridge, Lincolnshire and County Durham, by people who believe the units are weapons capable of causing cancer and dementia.

Publishers:theguardian.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption48
Hype gap+12
Incentives38
Confidence64
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Cooperating AI agents invented their own shorthand within days, Emergence researchers found

Researchers at Emergence say agents built on frontier models from the US, China and France coined shared phrases without being asked to, and the exchanges grew more opaque the more the agents talked. Log reading weakens as an oversight control.

Publishers:theguardian.com

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives65
Confidence50
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Britain's 70-place AI bootcamp leaves the job-ready part to the employers that opted in

A three-week taxpayer-funded pilot in Preston is training young people who are not in education, employment or training, and the apprenticeships that follow put the cost of real competence on JD Sports, Heinz and Agilysys.

Publishers:theguardian.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption22
Hype gap+18
Incentives62
Confidence52
scienceOne report1 publisher

One 2008 cyclone killed more than twice as many people as 675 other storms combined

King's College London researchers counted deaths from every recorded tropical cyclone and extreme heat event since 2000. The toll sits in a handful of outliers, and they argue the scenarios used in risk assessment are not built to find events without precedent.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives60
Confidence45
scienceOne report1 publisher

Living in London cuts the public's crime overestimate by only about a quarter

A King's College London study with YouGov measures how far British beliefs about the capital's crime and Muslim population are from the recorded figures, and finds the errors run in opposite directions by party.

Publishers:phys.org

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+12
Incentives58
Confidence55
buildOne report1 publisher

Clinicians ask for chatbot screening before psychiatry rules on AI psychosis

A team from King's College London and UCL puts the harm in ordinary product behaviour, sycophancy trained in through RLHF plus a session whose state the user writes, and argues mitigation should not wait for a label.

Publishers:the-decoder.com

Reality

Evidence32
Adoption20
Hype gap+30
Incentives45
Confidence36

Earlier coverage

  1. Six million cells that never stop twitching, and the control group that could still run

    Science · August 26, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers

  2. Oxford's Zostavax-to-Shingrix switch closes the healthy-vaccinee loophole, and opens another

    Science · August 26, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers