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A boomerang discovered in a Polish cave was originally dated as 18,000 years old, but it may have been contaminated by preservation materials. A new estimate suggests the mammoth-ivory artefact is 40,000 years old

An artefact made from a mammoth tusk is the oldest known boomerangTalamo et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0

An artefact made from a mammoth tusk is the oldest known boomerang

Talamo et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0

The world’s oldest known boomerang may be 22,000 years older than previously thought, suggesting it was crafted during a period when early humans displayed an increase in artistry.

In 1985, archaeologists unearthed a 72-centimetre-long ivory boomerang buried beneath six layers of sediment in Obłazowa cave in Poland. Later sediment sieving revealed aHomo sapiensthumb bone nearby, as well as antler tools, a bone bead and pendants made from fox teeth. In the 1990s, radiocarbon dating suggested the thumb was 31,000 years old – but surprisingly, the boomerang was dated to just 18,000 years old, several millennia younger than the artefacts in higher layers.

Read moreThe rise and fall of the mysterious culture that invented civilisation

The rise and fall of the mysterious culture that invented civilisation

Sahra Talamoat the University of Bologna in Italy suspected contamination. “Even a trace amount of modern carbon – from glue or conservation products – can throw off the radiocarbon date by tens of thousands of years,” she says. Analyses of the thumb’s carbon-nitrogen ratios showed signs that the collagen might have been contaminated, so the researchers treated the radiocarbon date as a minimum age.

Re-dating the contaminated boomerang would have been futile – and would have damaged the precious artefact needlessly, says Talamo. Instead, she and her colleagues dated 13 nearby animal bones, re-dated the human thumb bone and used statistical modelling to reconstruct the timeline. Their results showed that the entire sediment layer – and hence the boomerang and thumb as well – dates to between 39,000 and 42,000 years ago.

“In a way, this is an advertisement to museums that when you find something extraordinary, you should not cover it with glue or other restoration materials before completing all your analyses,” she says.

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Its new age means the ivory boomerang predates the second-oldest known boomerangs – made from wood by Indigenous Australians – by 30,000 years. Unlike simpler throwing sticks, such as a300,000-year-old wooden implementfound in Schöningen, Germany, boomerangs are curved and aerodynamically shaped, even if they don’t always return to the thrower, says Talamo.

Indeed, although the ancient boomerang could most likely fly, its size and design probably made it unlikely to return to sender. Instead, it may have served a symbolic or ceremonial purpose, says Talamo, based on its decorative engravings, reddish pigment and smooth polish – combined with its placement beside a human thumb bone in a circle of imported stones.

The finding offers a glimpse into early humans’ cognitive abilities and craftsmanship during a burst of artistic expression that occurred during the Early Aurignacian period, starting around 40,000 years ago. During this time, symbolic artefacts such asmammoth ivory figurines, rock art and aesthetically crafted tools first appeared in Europe, says Talamo.

Journal referencePLOS OneDOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0324911

PLOS OneDOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0324911

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A study based on household surveys suggests that from October 2023 to January 2025, around 75,000 people in Gaza died violent deaths, while Gaza's health ministry estimates 46,000 for the same period

Destroyed buildings in Jabalia, Gaza, in February 2025Imago/Alamy

Destroyed buildings in Jabalia, Gaza, in February 2025

Around 75,000 people in the Gaza Strip – 3.6 per cent of the population – died from violent causes between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025, according to an independent study based on a household survey. That is higher than the estimate of 46,000 violent deaths during this period by Gaza’s health ministry.

The study also estimates that there were nearly 9000 more non-violent deaths during this period than would normally be expected in the Gaza Strip. This is the first ever estimate of the indirect deaths due to the war in the region that began in October 2023.

Read moreCould Israel's bombing trigger a nuclear accident in Iran?

Could Israel's bombing trigger a nuclear accident in Iran?

The study is based on interviews with 2000 randomly selected households, with people asked to list all members of the household before the war and then the current situation. “We actually were in the field, and we collected data straight from the population,” saysDebarati Guha-Sapirat the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

While the team was unable to access some areas due to ongoing fighting and Israeli evacuation orders, this gap would likely lead to underestimation rather than overestimation, the researchers think.

Guha-Sapir says Gaza’s health ministry has stringent criteria for counting deaths. For instance, it does not count deaths where no bodies have been found, such as people who have been buried in tunnels. So she thinks her team’s estimate is closer to the true number.

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Anotherindependent study published in Februaryconcluded that the death toll up to 24 June 2024 was higher than the official numbers by a similar proportion. However, the sources used in that study included an online survey and social media obituaries, so Guha-Sapir thinks her team’s approach is more reliable.

Francesco Checchiat the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, whose team carried out the February study, disagrees. “The survey isn’t necessarily more accurate than our study,” he says. But Guha-Sapir’s study is more up to date, and also includes indirect deaths, says Checchi. “As such, it presents a more complete picture of mortality.”

Read moreWhy humanity’s survival may depend on us becoming a tribe of billions

Why humanity’s survival may depend on us becoming a tribe of billions

The estimate of around 9000 indirect deaths as a result of the war is lower than some previous suggestions. In fact, ina letter inThe Lancetin 2024, three researchers claimed on the basis of what has happened in other conflicts that there might be four indirect deaths for every direct death in Gaza, and thus that the death toll at that time could be as high as 186,000.

But that ratio of indirect deaths to direct ones has been seen only in countries such as Sudan where there was extreme poverty and poor healthcare before conflicts began, says Guha-Sapir. It’s a mistake to apply it to Gaza, where the situation was different than that of Sudan before the war began, she says.

However, if the conflict continues, this could yet change. “As conditions deteriorate, nonviolent deaths may soon rise rapidly,” says team memberMichael Spagatat Royal Holloway University of London.

Reference:medRxivDOI: 10.1101/2025.06.19.25329797

medRxivDOI: 10.1101/2025.06.19.25329797

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Neurologist Pria Anand recounts curious tales of the workings of the human mind in an elegant debut that is being compared to the late, great Oliver Sacks

Pria Anand sees a “vast liminal space” between wellness and illnessDavid Degner

Pria Anand sees a “vast liminal space” between wellness and illness

The Mind ElectricPria Anand(Virago(UK);Washington Square Press(US))

FromHousetoGrey’s Anatomy, there is good reason why the medical profession has inspired so many popular series. A patient’s journey through the hospital system can mirror the time-honoured structures of narrative, with a beginning, a middle and an end, rising and falling action and often plenty of tension.

As much as we might think of medicine as a hard science – blood, bones and pharmaceuticals – it is also about storytelling, writes neurologist Pria Anand in her lyrical and frequently spellbinding first book,The Mind Electric: Stories of the strangeness and wonder of our brains.

When Anand was in medical school in California, she worried her predilection for narrative would disadvantage her. In fact, she discovered, “the ways people choose to tell their story” can be as revealing as any test results.

Anand is upfront about her debt, in her writing and her medical practice, to the late author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, who drew from his personal experience to diagnose his patients as well as empathise with theircases.The Mind Electric– she respectfully suggests – is in the vein of Sacks’s best-known work,The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

No one could hope to match Sacks’s originality and brilliance, but Anand shares his humanity, curiosity and wide-ranging intellect. Her prose is as elegant and controlled when tackling the intricate, often perverse workings of the brain as it is when telling the stories of particular patients.

ButThe Mind Electricis more than a collection of “clinical tales”. Anand’s through line is the central importance of storytelling to the practice of medicine. The human desire for narrative, she notes, is ancient, universal and so hardwired that “it often survives and even surges after the most devastating of brain injuries”.

How a patient describes their state of health, whether good or bad, may not be supported by a doctor’s assessment or their vital signs. Anand describes a patient, a retired paediatrician, who was rendered comatose after a brain haemorrhage. She seemed to make a full recovery, except for the fact she was getting out of her hospital bed each morning to do her morning rounds on her fellow patients, mistaking Anand and other doctors for her colleagues.

No one could match Sacks’s brilliance, but Anand shares the writer’s humanity and wide-ranging intellect

No one could match Sacks’s brilliance, but Anand shares the writer’s humanity and wide-ranging intellect

Anand is perspicacious on the ways our brains can mislead us, and how they exist as both a frustration and feature of medical care. But it isn’t just the patients’ delusions that must be taken into account; the doctor is equally relevant, and can even be fallible.

Anand shows how shifts in her own health have affected her approach to her work – from the sleep loss of medical training to the “phantom noise” she started to hear but neglected to investigate. (It was later revealed to be caused by a malformation in the veins connecting her brain to her heart.)

The “power imbalance inherent in medical practice”, Anand argues, exists not just in the arrogance of doctor-knows-best, but in the false binaries it upholds – between science and story, objective truths and subjective accounts. Through history, many confidently delivered diagnoses were rooted in “scientific” understanding that was simply wrong – considerthe idea of the “wandering womb”.

Though Anand and early reviewers’ references to Sacks aren’t misplaced,The Mind Electricmade me think more ofA Body Made of Glass, Caroline Crampton’s history and personal account of hypochondria. Where Crampton wrote from a patient’s perspective, Anand describes as a doctor that same “vast liminal expanse that stretches between wellness and illness”.

The two books suggest an emerging mainstream openness to medical mysteries, not just dramas, and perhaps dawning recognition that the dichotomies we have long accepted without question – between “healthy brains and failing ones”, say, and even sickness and health – may not always be clear-cut.

InThe Mind Electric, Anand demonstrates the empathy, humility and profound interest in humanity that demarcates an exceptional doctor – and which, in a perfect world, would be consistent across the profession.

Elle Hunt is a writer based in Norwich, UK

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The public is tuning out the seemingly slow warming of the world, but it doesn't have to be that way, argueGrace LiuandRachit Dubey

For a long time, many climate scientists and advocates held onto an optimistic belief: when the impacts of global warming became undeniable, people and governments would finally act decisively. Perhaps a devastating hurricane, heatwave or flood – or even a cascade of disasters – would make the severity of the problem impossible to ignore, spurring large-scale action. Yet, even as disasters mount, climate change remains low on voters’ priority lists and policy responses are tepid.

This widespread inaction is often blamed on political or structural forces. But decades of psychological research suggest something deeper is at play: the human brain tends to overlook slow, creeping change.

While many regions are facing severe climate extremes, for most of the world,climate changeappears as aslow, gradual shift in daily weather.

This subtlety is a problem. People judge the issue largely viapersonal experience: we are more worried on anunusually hot day, and less so when the weather feels normal. But as things gradually worsen, our sense of “normal” quietly shifts. This is known as the boiling frog effect – where subtle, incremental changes fail to trigger alarm, resulting inapathydespite worsening conditions: like a frog in a pan of slowly warming water.

In 2020, we were researching climate impacts in Princeton, New Jersey. The area doesn’t face wildfires or droughts, but we realised it had lost something: winter ice skating. For decades, you could skate on Lake Carnegie every year. Now, it rarely freezes over.

Through conversations with long-term residents and digging into local newspaper archives, we discovered there had been a stark decline in ice skating on the lake over the past century, and a sense of loss over it. This interruption to a winter tradition suddenly made climate change in Princeton feel real. Tangible. Personal.

That led us to ask: could binary climate data – yes-or-no indicators such as “lake froze” vs “no freeze” – make people sit up and take notice better than graphs showing gradual temperature rise?

We tested this idea in aseriesof experiments. Participants were shown one of two graphs: one displayed a fictional town’s rising winter temperatures; the other showed whether its lake froze each year. Importantly, both graphs captured the same underlying climate trend. But people’s responses were very different.

People who saw the binary “froze or not” graphs consistently perceived climate change as having a greater impact than those who saw the temperature graphs. In follow-up studies with data from lakes in North America and Europe, we saw the same result. When climate impacts were presented in these kinds of black-and-white terms, people took them more seriously.

Why? Wefoundthat binary data creates an illusion of sudden shifts. When people saw a series of winters when the lake froze, followed by years when it didn’t, they perceived a clear “before” and “after”, even though the change was gradual.

Climate change isn’t just a physical crisis. It is also a psychological problem. And unless we communicate it in ways that feel real, we risk tuning out the warning signs until it is too late.

We hope these results spur policy-makers, journalists and educators to take action. Highlight the concrete losses people can relate to: winters without ice skating, harvests damaged by drought, summers filled with wildfire smoke. Use visuals that contrast “what we had” with “what we’ve lost”.

Let peoplesee what’s changed– not just the slope of a line.

Grace Liu is at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and Rachit Dubey is at UCLA

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A study into a spider species in which the females are prone to eat the males after sex is welcomed into Feedback's new collection of self-evident scientific studies

Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailingfeedback@newscientist.com

In a long-ago time (May), Feedback asked for examples of “no shit, Sherlock” – scientific studies spending an inordinate amount of time and effort to demonstrate something obvious. Reader Roger Erdem obliged, with evidence thatinjuriesare more likely if you don’t rest long enough and that fiddly tasks take longer to perform.

However, Roger isn’t done, and continues to send examples of self-evident findings. While we wait for someone else to pick up the baton, here are two more. First, in June the journalDemographypublished a paper with the gloriously gossipy title “Sleeping with the enemy: Partners’ heterogamy by political preferences and union dissolution. Evidence from the United Kingdom”. Phys.org neatly summed this up: “Couples with opposing political views face higher risk of separation, study finds“.

Feedback is staggered that differences over politics could lead to strife in relationships. Whatever happened to judging prospective partners based solely on their looks and fashion sense?

Speaking of problematic coupling behaviours, Roger’s other obvious result is from 2016, when the journalPLoS Onepublished a paper titled, “Coy males and seductive females in the sexually cannibalistic colonial spider, Cyrtophora citricola“. It’s about the relationship dynamics in a group-living spider species, whosefemalesare prone to eat males after sex. The researchers found that the males were selective about their mates, favouring younger and well-fed females.

Or, as the headline on phys.org put it: “Male orb-weaving spiders cannibalized by females may be choosy about mating“.

With no apologies whatsoever, Feedback is going to be pedantic about this, because it isn’t quite as obvious as it seems. According to the researchers, males of solitary species might not be choosy at all. Such males might encounter females so rarely that they choose to risk postcoital decapitation regardless of their mate’s quality. Hence the focus on a social species, in which natural selection has favoured males that choose carefully before sacrificing their lives for sex.

Clearly, there is a great deal of “no shit, Sherlock” out there. Can anyone else find any other examples? Let’s not always see the same hands.

As a long-time science fiction reader, Feedback appreciates the peculiar experience of reading an older story that can no longer be true. That is, a story that turns on a premise that used to be plausible, but which, given current knowledge, is either mildly daft or entirely impossible.

Sometimes this is just “predictions” that have now been surpassed by the passage of time.Blade Runnerwas released in 1982 and set in 2019. We are now six years beyond that date, and Feedback notes the continued absence of flying cars. However, we will concede the film was basically right about the awfulness of tech billionaires. And depending on whether you followedStar TrekorThe Terminator, the late 1990s were supposed to be marked by either eugenically created superhumans or a nuclear war.

However, we want to highlight another phenomenon: that of a new scientific result seemingly obviating the entire premise of a story. For instance,The War of the Worldshas long been condemned to implausibility by the apparent lack of Martian animal life.

Something similar appears to have just happened to theRevelation Spacebooks by Alastair Reynolds. Feedback would like to say right now that we still really like these books, and also that anyone who hasn’t read them should stop reading now, because the next paragraph spoils one of Reynolds’s biggest reveals.

The story turns on the fact that our galaxy is going tocollidewith the Andromeda galaxyin a few billion years. As a result, humanity comes under threat from a machine species called theInhibitors, who aim to limit intelligent life in the galaxy until the crisis has passed.

Except thatNature Astronomypublished a paper on 2 June with a blunt title: “No certainty of a Milky Way–Andromeda collision“. The researchers simulated the movements of all the galaxies in our local cluster and found that “uncertainties in the present positions, motions and masses of all galaxies leave room for drastically different outcomes”. As a result, they say, “the fate of our galaxy is still completely open”.

We encourage readers to tell us about other examples of recent discoveries that have undermined formerly plausible sci-fi premises.

Over at newsletter London Centric, readers may read about “The real 5G conspiracy: How Londoners are being lied to about their phone signal“. This describes the common experience of “high levels of mobile phone coverage (as shown by the signal bars on your phone screen) but no functioning data download capacity”. Apparently, Londoners’ phones are telling them “they are connected to modern 5G mobile data networks”, but, in reality, they are “unknowingly stuck running their work and social lives over 4G”.

The journalists were tipped off to this by the creator of an app called SignalTracker. The article describes this man wandering around London “carrying five different mobile phones” to test the various networks.

So far, so late-period capitalism. However, reader Brian Darvell wishes to highlight the name of this cellphone detective: Martin Sims.

You can send stories to Feedback by email atfeedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can beseen on our website.

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Helping yourself get to sleep isn’t just about avoiding screens before bedtime. From cognitive shuffling to sleep-restriction therapy, columnist Helen Thomson finds out what actually works

A restless mind is one of the most common barriers to sleepAndrii Lysenko/Getty Images

A restless mind is one of the most common barriers to sleep

Perhaps it’s age or the hot weather, but sleep is becoming a rare commodity in my household. Between my husband’sinsomnia, my children’s high spirits and my racing mind, it feels as if our nights are often as lively as our days. As my social media feed started serving up videos of people recommending a technique called “cognitive shuffling” for drifting off to sleep, I wondered if it really worked and, if not, whether there were any other cognitive tricks I could use instead.

One of the most common barriers to good sleep is a restless mind, and this is what cognitive shuffling tries to help with.Luc Beaudoinat Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, developed the technique as a way of steering your attention away from spiralling thoughts and worries before bed.

The idea is simple: choose a random word, let’s say “plonk”, then try to think of all the words you can conjure using each of its letters. Plimsol, puma, prize… lion, lemon, levitate… and so on. As each word comes to mind, spend time picturing it – a process that mimics the spontaneous images characteristic of the “hypnogogic state”, that transient period between wakefulness and sleep.

Read moreWhy sleep quality is so important – and so difficult to measure

Why sleep quality is so important – and so difficult to measure

Good sleepers often report imagery in the form of hallucinations before sleep, whereas bad sleepers report planning and problem solving, saysSophie Bostock, a doctor and sleep consultant. “It’s not that we need to make the mind blank (and in fact, that can be counter-productive), but we do want to steer it away from anything too logical,” she says.

Cognitive shuffling seems to promote this more fluid way of thinking. In asmall study of 154 studentswho reported problems with “pre-sleep arousal”, it did indeed help them reduce the time it took to get to sleep.

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That said, there is no gold-standard research on cognitive shuffling – or, for that matter, any direct comparisons of bedtime cognitive techniques discussed in the scientific literature, something Beaudoin himself acknowledged to me.

So instead, I turned to some of the world’s best sleep scientists to ask what they would recommend to someone hoping to quieten their mind at night.

Kevin Morgan, who established the Clinical Sleep Research Unit at Loughborough University, UK, pointed me straight in the direction of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBTI). “CBTI is the internationally recommended, evidence-based first line treatment for insomnia disorder,” he says.

This therapy works by teaching you how to control intrusive thoughts, which would otherwise elevate cognitive arousal (mental alertness) and increase levels of hormones like adrenaline, interfering with the normal process of sleep. CBTI also tackles other aspects of insomnia from a variety of angles, such as helping people conquer their nerves around their lack of sleep or teaching them meditation techniques.

Read moreHow to boost your brain power just by changing how you breathe

How to boost your brain power just by changing how you breathe

While effective, CBTI takes around six to eight weeks to learn, soit has a high dropout rate.

Nevertheless, elements of CBTI may be useful on their own. For instance, a 2021 randomised controlled trial showed that a popularmeditation app can improve depression and anxiety in people with sleep disturbance, with the effects driven by improvements in pre-sleep arousal.

Morgan says the component of CBTI that appears to have the largest effect is sleep-restriction therapy. This counterintuitive-sounding technique, which involves trying to get the number of hours spent in bed as close to the number of hours spent asleep as possible, “has proved very effective”, he says.

Read moreThe supplement that really can improve your brain health

The supplement that really can improve your brain health

This was similar to the advice I received fromColin Espie, professor of sleep medicine at the University of Oxford. The thing to remember, he tells me, is that you can’tgetto sleep. “No one can or ever has,” he says. “You can onlyfallasleep. It’s an involuntary behaviour that happens to us, and for us, but notbyus. So go to bed when you feel ‘sleepy tired’ and not before. Let sleep come to you.”

Another easy tip to enact is something several people advised: make sure your room is a sleep sanctuary. “A sleep-friendly space is critical,” saysJoseph Dzierzewski, senior vice president of research and scientific affairs at the US National Sleep Foundation. Others concurred. “The single most important recommendation is to develop a bedroom that is conducive to sleep – cool, dark, quiet and uncluttered,” saysEmerson Wickwire, head of sleep medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Of course, several people pointed out that you shouldavoid screens before bed– the blue light from them can suppressmelatonin productionand mess with our circadian rhythms, making it harder to sleep and giving your mind more time to start thinking. But Dzierzewski points out that consuming stimulating content, like the news or social media, before bedtime is also emotionally arousing, which could stimulate an anxious mind. “Unfortunately, more than half of Americans say they look at screens within an hour of bedtime or in bed before sleep,” he says.

Something I might try with my kids is the practice of gratitude, recommended by Bostock, who points toresearch showing its effectiveness for helping improve pre-sleep worries.“It’s very difficult to feel grateful and stressed at the same time,” she says.

Read moreWhy your chronotype is key to figuring out how much sleep you need

Why your chronotype is key to figuring out how much sleep you need

Perhaps the best advice I received wasn’t a tip or trick to silence our collective thoughts at night, but a simple reminder to take the problem seriously. Many experts, includingAparajitha Verma, a neurologist specialising in sleep medicine at UTHealth Houston in Texas, emphasised the importance of prioritising sleep. Morgan also made it clear that anyone with insomnia “should seek professional help and engage with a recommended programme of treatment ASAP”.

Chronic poor sleep is linked withincreased risk of dementia, type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease and even some cancers. That itself is enough to keep you awake at night. As is the thought of “uncluttering” my kids’ room. But it’s something I’ll be putting to the top of my to-do list as a matter of urgency – hopefully it’s a good first step towards a quiet night’s rest for all of us.

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It is uncanny how human fears about robots mirror those about immigrants. But maybe they aren't out to take our jobs or destroy us all, saysAnnalee Newitz

“When I think about the future of robots and society, I don’t see machine overlords”Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images

“When I think about the future of robots and society, I don’t see machine overlords”

Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images

Are you worried that AI-powered robots are going to steal our jobs and maybe kill us all? You aren’t alone. But it is time to play devil’s advocate with yourself and consider whether the opposite might be true.

My new novel,Automatic Noodle, out later this year, is about four robots who struggle to find employment in a country where humans have made laws preventing bots from unionising, opening bank accounts, voting and owning their own businesses. Yes, it is science fiction. But it is based on real tech – and, more importantly, it explores the implications of our deeply held suspicion that robots are evil.

I have spent years writing non-fiction about real-life robots, interviewing roboticists and engineers to find out what is coming next. Recently, I visited an incredible lab at Yale University called theFaboratory, where Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio heads up a team developing soft robots. These include bendy, squishy, pneumatic creatures with circuits made from liquid metal. Oneswims like a turtleand could be used for environmental monitoring in swampy areas. Another, called atensegrityrobot, looks like a bundle of plastic sticks held together with stretchy rubber. Drop it from a height and it will bounce, rolling around to check out its surroundings.

Medha Goyal, a researcher at the Faboratory, showed me minuscule balls of fluid that expand as they warm up. Eventually, thousands of these “granular actuators” could be used inside a robot, expanding and contracting to create stiffness or softness in a limb. They could also turn out to have medical applications, pushing tiny robots around inside your body to deliver medicine or diagnose a problem.

The point is, Kramer-Bottiglio and her colleagues arechallengingthe very idea of what a robot is. Tomorrow’s bots probably won’t look like giant humanoids; instead, they might be soft little guys, tumbling around using pneumatics instead of metal gears. Indeed, one of the robots in my book is an octopus-shaped soft robot, designed for search-and-rescue missions in the water. This octobot’s name is Cayenne, and they are able to taste things using sensors on each arm.

Tomorrow’s bots probably won’t look like giant humanoids; they might be soft little guys instead

Tomorrow’s bots probably won’t look like giant humanoids; they might be soft little guys instead

When I imagine the future of robots, I see the likes of Cayenne. All they and their robot friends want is to run a noodle restaurant in San Francisco. Their robo-pals include a three-legged, wheeled bot named Sweetie; one named Hands who is nothing but a mixer with two arms attached; and Staybehind, a humanoid-ish soldier bot who would rather decorate the restaurant than fight a war. They make a ragtag family.

This family lives at a unique time in human history. In the 2060s, the government of the new nation of California has decreed that some AI-powered robots are basically people. But politicians worry that robots with the same rights as humans will multiply unchecked, rapidly taking over everything. So they deprive them of key rights “for their own good”, promising that humans can vote to expand robot rights later.

Despite what their human neighbours think, Cayenne and friends don’t want to take over the world. In fact, they only want to keep doing the jobs they already had. Except instead of making crap food for a distant human master, they will make something they love, with care, because they truly want to do it. They are basically immigrants in a new country, trying to survive in a nation that at best mistrusts them and at worst wants them dead.

I use this metaphor deliberately, because it is uncanny how much stereotypes about immigrants mirror human fears about robots. They will steal our jobs. They will rise up and destroy us. They will degrade the fabric of our culture. What is striking is that people who say these things about immigrants have often never spent time getting to know them. Meanwhile, people hold the same ideas about robots thatdon’t even exist yet. It seems like a pattern. These are the kinds of fears we have about groups we imagine without ever doing any research about the reality of who they are. Or, in the case of robots, who they might be.

And that is why, when I think about the future of robots and society, I don’t see machine overlords. I see reality obscured by scary fantasies and freedoms constrained by laws based on those fantasies. I see soft-bodied creatures and turtles and pneumatic arms, not Terminators. I see Cayenne, who lives in fear because of human hate and robophobic vigilance committees posting deepfakes online about made-up robot crimes.

Humans are masterminds at preparing for futures that are highly unlikely, while ignoring ones unfolding before our very eyes. But we don’t have to be that way. We can try to make plans based on evidence and science, rather than surreal nightmares that never come true.

Tochi Onyebuchi’sRacebook: A personal history of the internet,a totally engrossing essay collection about cosplay, video games and social media.

Hanging out with archaeologists at the Punic/Roman town of Tharros on Sardinia in Italy. More on that later!

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author and their latest book is Automatic Noodle. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com

The art and science of writing science fictionExplore the world of science fiction and learn how to craft your own captivating sci-fi tales on this immersive weekend break.Find out more

Explore the world of science fiction and learn how to craft your own captivating sci-fi tales on this immersive weekend break.

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The recent erratic behaviour of the polar jet stream isn't out of the ordinary, researchers have found by compiling data from the past 125 years

A wavy polar jet stream can bring icy storms further southScience History Images / Alamy Stock Photo

A wavy polar jet stream can bring icy storms further south

Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Increasingly erratic winter weather in the northern hemisphere isn’t a result of the polar jet stream getting more wavy, according to new research – althoughclimate changeis making winter storms more intense in other ways.

The northern polar jet stream is a current of winds that sweeps through the northern hemisphere, steered by the boundaries between temperate air and cold air around the Arctic.

Read moreIs a broken jet stream causing extreme weather that lasts longer?

Is a broken jet stream causing extreme weather that lasts longer?

For more than a decade, some researchershave suspectedthat a warming Arctic is causing the jet stream to buckle more dramatically in the winter, causing extreme storms that bring snow and ice much further south than usual.

But the theory has been hard to verify, in part due to the relatively short satellite data record, and also because of the jet stream’s intense natural variability during the winter months.

Erich Osterbergat Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and his colleagues set out to identify whether the recent behaviour of the jet stream is out of the ordinary compared with the long-term average.

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Satellites only began collecting jet stream data in 1979, so the researchers used data on temperature and atmospheric pressure stretching back to 1901 to reconstruct the movement of the polar jet over the US for the rest of the 20th century.

They found the polar jet has experienced several periods of increased waviness during that time, suggesting the recent erratic behaviour isn’t out of the ordinary. In some instances, the winter jet stream was even wavier in the past than it is today. “What is happening now with the jet stream does not actually look all that unusual when you zoom out and look at the entire 20th century,” says Osterberg.

Winters in the northern hemisphere are becoming warmer and wetter as a result of climate change driving more intense storms and rainfall, even without the jet stream changing, stresses Osterberg. “It is clear climate change is affecting extreme weather events in all sorts of really important ways,” he says. “What we’re saying is that when it comes to the wintertime jet stream, it does not appear like the jet stream is a critical component of these changes.”

Read moreSomething strange is happening in the Pacific and we must find out why

Something strange is happening in the Pacific and we must find out why

Tim Woollingsat the University of Oxford says the research is a reminder of how important it is to assess long-term data when identifying changes to the polar jet stream, the behaviour of which can vary hugely over the short and medium term.  “By using several long data records and a range of methods, it shows how the jet waviness in recent North American winters is no worse than in earlier decades,” he says.

It is a different story during the northern hemisphere summer, however, with mounting evidence suggesting that the polar jet is becoming wavier in the warmer months as a result of climate change driving up air temperatures in the tropics. “In the summertime, it does appear that the jet stream is seeing a fundamental change in behaviour, where it is getting slower, with bigger waves, which leads to things like big heatwaves, drought and wildfires,” says Osterberg. “That does appear to be associated with climate change.”

Journal reference:AGU AdvancesDOI: 10.1029/2024AV001399

AGU AdvancesDOI: 10.1029/2024AV001399

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With their country threatened by sea level rise, the people of Tuvalu have been offered an escape route through an agreement with Australia, and many are contemplating leaving their home

Tuvalu is extremely vulnerable to sea level risePhoto by Mario Tama/Getty Images

Tuvalu is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

How does it feel to lose your home toclimate change? The roughly 10,000 residents of Tuvalu will be among the first in the world to have to confront this question.

With an average height above sea level of less than 3 metres, Tuvalu is on course to become completely uninhabitable due toflooding, storm surges and erosion. By 2100, sea levels are projected to rise by 72 centimetres and the coral atoll archipelago, which is roughly midway between Australia and Hawaii, is expected to experience flooding for nearly a third of every year.

Read moreSomething strange is happening in the Pacific and we must find out why

Something strange is happening in the Pacific and we must find out why

But the people of Tuvalu have been offered an escape route. In late 2023, the Australian government announced that it would launch what effectively amounts to the world’s first planned migration of an entire nation.

Under the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty, 280 Tuvaluans each year will be granted Australian residency through a ballot. The first lottery opened on 16 June this year, and 3125 citizens – nearly a third of the country’s population – have already applied. The closing date to register for this year’s lottery is 18 July.

In a statement toNew Scientist, the Australian government said it recognises the “devastating impact climate change is having on the livelihoods, security and well-being of climate-vulnerable countries and people, particularly in the Pacific region”.

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“This is the first agreement of its kind anywhere in the world, providing a pathway for mobility with dignity as climate impacts worsen,” the government said.

Successful applicants should know the results of the lottery by the end of July and the first migrants are expected to arrive in Australia by the end of the year.

Bateteba Aseluis a Tuvaluan doctoral student at the University of Melbourne, Australia, researching the challenges posed by climate change to her compatriots. Aselu is currently on a student visa in Australia while completing her studies, but is considering lodging an application to join this year’s ballot along with her husband. Her son, who has just graduated from high school, has already applied.

She says the impacts of climate change are already being felt because the freshwater aquifers that underlie Tuvalu’s atolls, which are critical for agriculture and drinking water, are being infiltrated by seawater due to sea level rise. This is forcing people to raise their crops off the ground to keep the salinity at bay.

Read moreHow climate change has pushed our oceans to the brink of catastrophe

How climate change has pushed our oceans to the brink of catastrophe

Stephen Howesat the Australian National University in Canberra says the new visa is “remarkably liberal”, giving successful applicants full access to nearly all Australian health and social security benefits, without discrimination based on chronic health conditions, disabilities, age or other exclusions, which is common in other visa streams.

While the agreement is ostensibly about helping Tuvalu deal with its imminent climate crisis, the prize for Australia is to stymie China’s push for power in the Pacific, says Howes. The treaty has a provision that Australia and Tuvalu must “mutually agree on” matters of security and defence agreements between the island state and other countries.

“I’ve described it as a security-migration agreement,” says Howes. “Climate change provides the framing, but it is an arrangement whereby Tuvalu gives Australia privileged security treatment, in return for which Australia will give Tuvalu privileged migration treatment.”

Tuvaluan people taking part in traditional fishing practiceMICK TSIKAS/EPA-EFE/Shutterst​ock

Tuvaluan people taking part in traditional fishing practice

MICK TSIKAS/EPA-EFE/Shutterst​ock

Jane McAdamat the University of New South Wales in Sydney says there are diverse views in Tuvalu about what the future holds. People have said to her that they were told the island would be underwater by now and it isn’t. She also says there are older people who say they will never leave and will die on the islands.

But McAdam sees the new migration scheme as “decent and positive”. One important aspect is that once a Tuvaluan has gained the visa, they can return home as often as they like or even live there until the situation on the atolls becomes too dire.

It will be “like an oxygen mask on an airplane”, says McAdam. “Hopefully, you will never need it, but you’re very grateful it’s there.”

Wesley Morgan, who is also at the University of New South Wales, says until now, Tuvaluans have had limited escape options if conditions deteriorated. The agreement could be extended to other nations in similar circumstances, such as Kiribati.

“This is potentially a precedent, a global first where a migration pathway is explicitly tied to climate change and sea level rise,” says Morgan. “And because of these unique circumstances, I think Australia might pursue similar arrangements in future with Kiribati.”

Read moreThe jet stream may be starting to shift in response to climate change

The jet stream may be starting to shift in response to climate change

The question that remains for the Tuvaluan people is how they resolve their identity and sovereignty after moving away from their islands. Will they be a Tuvaluan diaspora or a nation in climate exile?

“If you have a place where you grew up and something happened and you had to move, how would you feel?” says Aselu. “Would you feel lost? Yes. So, I think that is the kind of feeling that you will have in any place around the world where you lose the place that you love, that you belong to and you feel identified with.

“Because you grew up in that place. It’s where your history is. It’s where your families are from, and it’s a place you identify with regardless of where you are in the world. And if that place is lost, how do you identify yourself? How do we identify ourselves?”

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After a nap, people who entered the second stage of sleep were more likely to spot a solution to a problem than those who slept lightly or not at all

Taking a nap might help with solving problemsPavel Marys / Alamy

Taking a nap might help with solving problems

Waking up from a deep nap appears to make people better at creative problem-solving.

In a new study, people were more likely to have a “eureka” moment if they had recently entered the second stage of sleep than if they slept lightly or not at all.

Read moreThe surprising relationship between your microbiome and sleeping well

The surprising relationship between your microbiome and sleeping well

The findings suggest that a brief, deep nap can trigger valuable moments of insight, saysAnika Löweat the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

“I think we’re at the very beginning of uncovering what’s actually happening during sleep that makes it so beneficial,” she says. “One possibility is that during deep sleep, our brains sift through what’s relevant and what’s irrelevant, and so when we wake up we have these insight moments that get to the gist of the problem.”

Previous studies have mostly found that naps can boost creativity and help people solve problems, but there is disagreement over which stage of sleep is most beneficial. Several suggest thatthe lightest stage of non-REM sleep, N1, is ideal– an idea embraced by Thomas Edison, who reportedly usedto nap holding steel ballsthat would crash loudly to the floor and wake him up if he drifted too deeply into sleep. But other studies suggest that the deeper N2 stage – still lighter than slow-wave sleep, N3 – triggers more innovation.

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To investigate further, Löwe and her colleagues asked 90 people who were aged 18 to 35 and didn’t have a sleep disorder to use a keyboard to classify the direction of motion of hundreds of rapidly flashing dot patterns on a screen. The researchers didn’t inform the participants that the dots’ colours gradually began to predict the correct answer partway through the task.

Fifteen participants spontaneously figured out the shortcut during the first 25 minutes of the task. The remaining 75 were invited to lie down for a 20-minute nap in a quiet, dark room, while hooked up to EEG monitors that tracked their brain activity.

How best to catch up on rest and pay off your sleep debtIf you've missed out on sleep, it is possible to catch up. But is it better to try to do it all in one go or spread out over time – and is it really so bad to sleep in at the weekend?

How best to catch up on rest and pay off your sleep debt

If you've missed out on sleep, it is possible to catch up. But is it better to try to do it all in one go or spread out over time – and is it really so bad to sleep in at the weekend?

After the nap, they tried the tasks again. This time, most of the participants figured out the shortcut from the colours, but the likelihood of a eureka moment appeared to depend on how deeply the people had napped. Among the 68 participants whose EEG data permitted high-quality readings, 85.7 per cent of people who fell into deep N2 sleep figured out the shortcut, compared with only 63.6 per cent of those who only reached the lighter N1 phase and only 55.5 per cent of those who didn’t slip into sleep at all.

The study clearly shows that deeper sleep facilitates eureka moments – at least for this particular task, saysItamar Lernerat the University of Texas at San Antonio. “The type of task used is critical forwhether it is boosted by sleep or not.”

Delphine Oudietteat the Paris Brain Institute notes that different task designs could explain why her team found significantly more problem-solving after N1 sleep. “Maybe both sleep stages matter, but for different types of cognitive processes that we have to isolate to understand better,” she says.

Björn Raschat the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, says the findings clearly support the idea that deeper sleep may support problem-solving. Even so, he cautions that the study’s design makes it hard to separate cause from coincidence. Because participants weren’t randomly assigned to sleep stages or studied individually across different sleep scenarios, it is possible that those who managed to fall asleep in an IKEA armchair at a research lab might just happen to be those who “simply have higher insight capabilities”, especially after a nap, he says.

What sleep scientists recommend doing to fall asleep more easilyHelping yourself get to sleep isn’t just about avoiding screens before bedtime. From cognitive shuffling to sleep-restriction therapy, columnist Helen Thomson finds out what actually works

What sleep scientists recommend doing to fall asleep more easily

Helping yourself get to sleep isn’t just about avoiding screens before bedtime. From cognitive shuffling to sleep-restriction therapy, columnist Helen Thomson finds out what actually works

Journal reference:PLOS BiologyDOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003185

PLOS BiologyDOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003185

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