Michael Le Page

Time series graph showing the duration of longest heatwave event in Sodankylä Tähtelä. The values range generally between 0 and 14, but in 2025 the heatwave has now lasted for 26 days.

The heatwave in Sodankylä has now lasted for 26 days.

This is probably not only the longest heatwave in Lapland, but also the longest heatwave ever observed in Finland.

Note that here a heatwave is defined with 3 consecutive days above 90th percentile, which is scientifically robust definition.

Critics of de-extinction research hit by mystery smear campaign Several researchers who have been critical of Colossal Biosciences’ plans to revive extinct animals say they have been targeted by online articles trying to discredit them

In far less pleasant news -- it turns out that @devoevomed.bsky.social, @nicrawlencenz.bsky.social & I have all been targets of on-line smear articles, all in reference to our public criticisms of de-extinction.

www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

YouTube video by New Scientist Is Ozempic the new anti-ageing drug?

This week's podcast:
💥 Ozempic reverses ageing!
🦠E.coli created with 101,000 changes to its genome
🌏Geology of the latest megathrust earthquake
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmEj...

You can graft a tomato plant onto a potato rootstock, and get both from one plant - they're sold as TomTato plants

This discovery might help explain why is possible:

Ageing in the brain may be caused by a breakdown in protein production The discovery that brain ageing may be driven by jammed-up protein factories could lead to better ways to help us stay sharp as we get older

Brain ageing might be due to a vicious cycle in which the protein-making factories 🏭 get jammed-up while making the kinds of proteins needed for... protein factories 🧪

The good news is this discovery could lead to better treatments

www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

E. coli genome has been remade with 101,000 changes to its DNA The recoded bacterium uses only 57 of the 64 possible genetic codes, freeing up seven to be used for different purposes

We have gone further than ever before in reshaping life, resynthesising the 4-million base pairs-long genome 🧬 of E. coli from scratch with 100,000 changes 🧪

Making that many changes screws up a lot of things, so getting it working was a "gargantuan effort"

www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

This is very odd - we've found loads of articles attempting to discredit these scientists, all anonymously published. It's still unclear who is producing these articles, and why

Great de-extinction reporting by @sparkes.bsky.social here:

Critics of de-extinction research hit by mystery smear campaign Several researchers who have been critical of Colossal Biosciences’ plans to revive extinct animals say they have been targeted by online articles trying to discredit them

Several scholars (including me) who have been critical of Colossal Biosciences and de-extinction have been targeted by a mysterious harassment campaign

www.newscientist.com/article/2490...

Job alert - @theguardian.com is seeking a Senior Investigative Science Reporter based in the US (full-time, permanent)

workforus.theguardian.com/jobs/795/

Did music streaming exist when you were a teenager?

Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death A city traffic engineer credits the success to lower speed limits and smarter design.

"Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week."

This is the direct and predictable result of policy decisions, not random happenstance.

#visionzero #publichealth

yle.fi/a/74-20174831

Just a friendly reminder that NOAA, the agency some are eager to gut, is the same one that maintains the tsunami early warning buoys keeping coastal communities safe.
#NOAA #TsunamiWarning #PublicSafety #ScienceMatters

nctr.pmel.noaa.gov/Dart/

Reuters reported Friday that U.S. diplomats asked the State Dept whether it could process refugee claims from South Africans who speak Afrikaans but are of mixed-race descent. A senior dept. official informed them "the program is intended for white people."

www.msn.com/en-gb/news/w...

We're undergoing an unprecedented loss of freshwater across the planet Rising temperatures are causing water to evaporate and driving humans to extract more groundwater, which is moving freshwater from the land to the seas and creating a "continental drying" trend

Since 2015, freshwater loss from land — mainly from pumping groundwater — has contributed more to sea level rise than melt from Antarctic ice sheet. 🧪

Neanderthals were probably maggot-munchers, not hyper-carnivores It has been claimed Neanderthals ate a huge amount of meat based on isotope ratios in their bones – but the explanation could instead be a diet rich in maggots

“Masses of maggots are these easily scoopable, collectible, nutrient-rich resource,” says Melanie Beasley at Purdue University 🧪

There is lots of evidence that they were routinely eaten in many societies in the past, and they are still consumed in places today

www.newscientist.com/article/2489...

Neanderthals were probably maggot-munchers, not hyper-carnivores It has been claimed Neanderthals ate a huge amount of meat based on isotope ratios in their bones – but the explanation could instead be a diet rich in maggots

Yet more evidence that besides plants, the real paleo diet 🐛 included rotten meat with plenty of maggots 🧪

www.newscientist.com/article/2489...

Did ceratopsian (horned) & ankylosaur (armored) dinosaurs walk together? Newly discovered dinosaur tracksite in Dinosaur Provincial Park (Alberta CA) suggests they did, similar to modern multi-species herds. News item includes comments by Yours Truly. 🧪🦖🐾

P.S. Quite a day for cool fossil finds!

AI helps reconstruct damaged Latin inscriptions from the Roman Empire Google DeepMind and historians created an AI tool called Aeneas that can predict the missing words in Latin inscriptions carved into stone walls and pottery sherds from the ancient Roman Empire.

Latin inscriptions from the Roman Empire shed light on the lives of both emperors and enslaved people. But most inscriptions are fragmented with missing pieces.

Now the Aeneas AI developed by Google DeepMind and scholars can fill in the gaps.

🧪#Archaeology

www.newscientist.com/article/2489...

Remarkable set of tracks suggests different dinosaurs herded together Late Cretaceous dinosaur tracks found in Canada might have been made by different species walking together, but the evidence is far from conclusive

It's likely that different species of plant-eating dinosaurs 🦕 herded together for protection like many modern animals do - and now we have some tentative evidence for this, in a set of 76-million-year-old tracks 👣 discovered in Canada 🧪

www.newscientist.com/article/2489...

As this rock forms on beaches, reading this piece made me wonder if we could deliberately exploit this to defend coastlines. Is that a possibility, @aowen0917.bsky.social‬ ?

So far in 2025, wildfires have burned more than 450 km² of land across the UK, surpassing anything seen in recent years by a wide margin.

The UK wildfire season typically peaks in spring; however, worsening drought conditions are making summer fires increasingly common.

Should we preserve the pre-AI internet before it is contaminated? The rise of AI-generated content since 2022 risks making it impossible to know when information was produced solely by humans, which could be a problem for both future AI and historians

There was a moment, somewhere in late 2022, after which we couldn't be sure words or pictures were computer-generated or not.

Some people are trying to preserve what came before, and some are trying to preserve what came after.

www.newscientist.com/article/2488...

Climate scientists urge others to take up CO2 tracking as US cuts loom Proposed budget cuts in the US will lead to the loss of vital carbon dioxide measurements, but no other countries are preparing to step in so far, researchers warn

"Asked if it had any plans to replace what NOAA does, the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service directed New Scientist to contact the European Commission’s DEFIS. DEFIS didn’t respond by the deadline for this article." rt/ @mjflepage.bsky.social

Spears and Geruso say that in the long run no country has managed to get the fertility rate 👶 back above the replacement level once it's fallen below it, despite many trying

So it's not clear how we prevent the population plummeting if we want to 3/

People worldwide are having fewer and fewer children, and the world's population will start to fall around 2080 or sooner. Extrapolate that trend 📉 and you get the 4/5 figure

But surely that trend won't continue, you say? 2/

Provocative new book says we must persuade people to have more babies The population is set to plummet and we don't know how to stop it, warn Dean Spears and Michael Geruso in their new book, After the Spike

Four-fifths of all the humans 🤰 who will ever be born may already have been born 🧪

That's one of the claims in the book After the Spike by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso. Could they be right? 1/

www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

Beating cancer: How viruses are being used to infect and kill tumours We’ve long known that viruses can target cancers in our bodies. Now, thanks to gene editing, we’re using them as tumour search and destroy agents – and getting our immune systems to join the fight too

I wrote an award-winning feature about the long efforts to develop cancer-killing viruses back in 2019

A key challenge is making the viruses more deadly to cancer cells but harmless to healthy cells

www.newscientist.com/article/mg24...

Herpes virus could soon be approved to treat severe skin cancer A cancer-killing virus could soon be approved for use after shrinking tumours in a third of people with late-stage melanoma

A cancer-killing, immune-stimulating virus 🦠 called RP1 could be approved soon 🧪

It would be only the second cancer-killing virus ever to get regulatory approval in the US and Europe

www.newscientist.com/article/2487...

Colossal's plans to "de-extinct" the giant moa are still impossible After a controversial project claiming to have resurrected the dire wolf, Colossal Biosciences has now announced plans to bring back nine species of the extinct moa bird

Colossal are working with Peter Jackson on this. What next, they're bringing back actual hobbits?

www.newscientist.com/article/2487...