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AN ENTIRE mammalian brain has been successfully preserved using a technique that will now be offered to people who are terminally ill. The intention is to preserve all the neural information thought necessary to one day reconstruct the mind of the person it once belonged to. “They would need to donate their brain and body for scientific research,” says Borys Wróbel at Nectome in Portland, Oregon, a research company focused on memory preservation. “But what we are offering… is for their body and brain to be kept, essentially indefinitely, in the hope that, sometime in the future, it would be possible to read out the information from the brain and reconstruct the person… to allow them to continue, in effect, with their life.” When it comes to preserving the minute…

TAR made from birch tree bark is commonly found at Neanderthal sites. Now, experiments have shown that it has antibiotic properties, regardless of how it is made, hinting that Neanderthals could have discovered its medicinal uses. The finding adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that Neanderthals used medicinal plants to treat injuries and diseases. “Birch tar as a substance has been known for quite a while from the late Pleistocene, specifically from Neanderthal sites across Europe,” says Tjaark Siemssen at the University of Oxford. “It’s pretty clear that it’s been used as an adhesive”, says Siemssen, for instance, to attach sharpened stone heads onto wooden spears. However, he says that may not have been its only use. In some Indigenous communities in recent centuries, birch tar has been…

THE Perseverance rover has found precious stones inside Martian pebbles. These gem grains are made of a substance called corundum, which is also known as ruby or sapphire depending on the traces of metals within it. Ann Ollila at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and her colleagues first spotted hints of corundum while using Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument to examine a rock called Hampden River. SuperCam has several different ways to test a material’s composition, using two different lasers to either burn off its surface or provoke luminescence, then two cameras to examine the resulting light. In both tests, the results for Hampden River were nearly identical to those from rubies measured in the lab, indicating the presence of tiny grains of corundum in the rock. When the rover eventually…

CRITICAL security credentials are inadvertently being exposed on thousands of websites – including those run by some banks and healthcare providers. The leaked details could have given snoopers access to sensitive data like RSA private keys, which allow attackers to impersonate servers, decrypt private communications or gain full administrative control of a company’s digital infrastructure. “This is a very significant issue, and it doesn’t affect only small companies, but some very big companies,” says Nurullah Demir at Stanford University in California. Demir and his colleagues analysed 10 million web pages to uncover how many leaked application programming interface (API) credentials. API keys allow different software systems to seamlessly communicate, acting as access tokens for cloud platforms, payment processors and messaging services. By scanning the web, they identified 1748 verified, active…

GERD FALTINGS has won the 2026 Abel prize, considered the Nobel prize of mathematics, for a groundbreaking proof which took mathematics by storm in 1983. The crowning achievement of Faltings, who also won the Fields medal in 1986 for the same work, was proving the Mordell conjecture, a longstanding theorem first proposed by Louis Mordell in 1922 which argues that increasingly complicated equations produce fewer solutions. Faltings, who is based at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany, says he was “honoured” when he found out the news, but was reserved about the impact of his achievements. “I solved [the Mordell conjecture], but in the end it doesn’t allow us to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s, it’s just extending our knowledge of things.” The Mordell conjecture concerns Diophantine equations, a category…

A LIVING, synthetic cell has been made by transplanting a complete genome into a dead bacterium, bringing it back to life. The breakthrough could help synthetic biology live up to its huge, but still distant, promise of engineering organisms to create sustainable fuels, pharmaceuticals and new materials. Synthetic biology involves tweaking biological systems or creating new ones to introduce novel functions, such as rewriting yeast DNA so that the organisms make desirable chemicals. In an effort to make more versatile engineered microbes, in 2010 researchers synthesised a bacterial genome and then transplanted it into a living cell, creating what they called the first synthetic cell. But there was a problem. It was very difficult to be sure whether the cell was truly being governed by the synthetic genome, rather than…

Transporting antimatter isn’t the only recent breakthrough at CERN (see main story). A new particle has also popped into existence at the Large Hadron Collider. Protons and neutrons are examples of a class of particles called baryons, which each contain three fundamental subatomic particles called quarks. In the case of a proton, there are two “up” quarks and one “down”. But heavier quarks, like those known as charm quarks, can also combine to make baryons. In 2017, physicists working at CERN’s LHCb experiment glimpsed one of these exotic baryons, named Xicc++, that was made up of two charm quarks and an up quark. Now, physicists working on the LHCb experiment have spotted its charm-filled sister, Xicc+, which contains a down quark instead of an up, making it a heavier analogue of…

NESTLED in the heart of the CERN particle physics laboratory’s antimatter factory in Switzerland, surrounded by intensely powerful magnetic fields and within a vacuum sparser than interstellar space, is some of the most sensitive material on Earth. Inside a filing cabinet-sized box, which weighs a few hundred kilograms less than a Ford Focus, are a handful of antiprotons that have sat for weeks in extraordinary stillness. Most other particles produced in this building might expect to be probed and prodded, but these antiprotons have just one job: to sit tight and wait for their ride. At the time New Scientist went to press, preparations were under way to transport these hundred or so antimatter particles on the back of a truck around a 4-kilometre loop of road around the CERN…

SLEEPING with a partner leads to more overnight wake-ups than sleeping alone. Often, these disturbances are brief, but there are strategies to address them if they become problematic. “Research finds that… people think they sleep better together than when they sleep apart, but when you objectively measure it, there’s more sleep disruption when they sleep together,” says Sean Drummond at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. To explore the effects of bed-sharing on couples’ sleep, Lionel Rayward at Queensland University of Technology in Australia and his colleagues conducted a systematic review of the existing research. All the studies they reviewed found evidence of partner disturbance while co-sleeping, with 30 to 46 per cent of couples’ movements being shared (Sleep Health: Journal of the National Sleep Foundation, doi.org/qv8r). In other words, when…