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British science and technology magazine and website covering new research, discoveries and science news across fields from physics to medicine.
IPC warns hunger has reached famine levels in two Darfur refugee camps as El Niño drought covers almost half of Sudan. CARE's Manon Radosta says the risk of a wider famine is rising, though the IPC has not declared one across the region.
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Yale's John Sous says correcting errors in physics benchmark problems lifted cutting-edge AI scores from as low as 30% to as high as 94%. Well-defined problems may be within reach, but the case that physics will follow maths is still open.
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Thwaites Glacier kept losing ice for all 150 simulated years in three models with ocean melting set to zero, New Scientist reports. The setup is physically impossible, so it shows the glacier's momentum but not how much sea level will rise.
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Caroline Needell's team found the tallest glacier cliffs retreating faster than models predict, yet none showed unstable retreat in satellite data. That moves the sea-level question to whether faster flow can thin the cliffs before they fail.
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Researchers led by Stephen Hennigar at Pennington Biomedical found testosterone below 300 ng/dL in 26% of 479 male US Army personnel. The count is of readings against a cutoff, so it sizes the pool the new age-30 screening rule could flag.
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Paul Chichester, the NCSC's director of operations, says Russia, China, North Korea and Iran all use AI to attack the UK. New Scientist's report of the interview includes no attack counts, so the size of any rise in volume is unstated.
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Danish Meteorological Institute researchers report that the AMOC starts strengthening within decades of global cooling in one climate model. Getting that cooling at 0.2C a decade would take carbon removal equal to current annual emissions.
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Sanger Institute researchers sequenced 45 samples from one pair of twins and found that a rare sarcoma began in one sister and spread to the other before birth. The same genomes hint at a different way for identical twins to form, though this is one pregnancy.
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El Niño cut India's summer monsoon rainfall by 13 per cent, New Scientist reported. UK farms that have just had record heat and drought are expecting a warm, wet, stormy winter from the same event.
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Laurel Morris's team at Mount Sinai reported that one neurofeedback session improved mood in people with depression more than sham feedback did. It lasted into the next day, was gone at one week, and came without a significant difference in activity in the targeted region.
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Philippe Ciais's team estimates the land carbon sink took up 2.36 gigatonnes of carbon in 2025, 0.71 above the 2015-2022 average. The figure is preliminary and covers a single year, so it addresses the 2023-24 collapse but leaves a slow decline untested.
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NOAA's Boyin Huang and colleagues put the 1877/78 El Niño at 2.88C above average in the Nino3 index, among the strongest in modern history. New Scientist traces an estimated 20 million to 30 million famine deaths in India, China and Brazil between 1876 and 1879 to that event.
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Rospotrebnadzor ended its quarantine on 7 October and freed most of the nearly 200 people held over a lab worker's death, after tests found no dangerous pathogen. What killed 28-year-old Daria Shipilova, and why the response far exceeded plague protocol, remains unexplained.
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This El Niño is already the strongest on record, running 3.4C above average in an equatorial Pacific region and still climbing, New Scientist reports. The larger worry is climate regime shifts that could persist for decades after the Pacific cools.
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Indonesia's fires grew roughly fourfold after June as the strongest El Niño on record began forming, with emissions on track to match 2015. The event is still strengthening on 1.4C of warming, and the year's outlook leans on a short record of past El Niños.
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Petter Brodin's team found 39% of infants with a strong first-week immune 'seeding' reaction had eczema or food allergy by age 1, against 12% of the rest. The data, from nearly 600 Swedish babies, tie the risk to gut bacteria and feeding, and would put any prevention window within days of birth if the link proves causal.
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Nirao Shah's Stanford team found that female mice need a neuron type making up under 0.001 per cent of brain cells to sustain a pregnancy. Any role in unexplained miscarriage or failed IVF in women is still a hypothesis, because the deletion experiment can only be done in animals.
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Trees for Cities says half the saplings it planted in London in the past year died this summer, when 80 to 90 per cent normally survive. Kew's modelling suggests the replacements will need to be different species.
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Safa Donmez's Ankara team found a VR river scene plus classical music added about 4 mmHg to the drug-driven blood pressure drop in 130 emergency patients. By 60 minutes the groups matched, so hospitals would be adopting a faster first quarter-hour of care.
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Amazon clearing has halved since Lula restored the environmental agencies in 2023. The Brazilian researchers who watch the forest expect a win for Flavio Bolsonaro to push the rate back up toward its 2021 peak.
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Science · August 20, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers