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Credit: Yoshinari Sasaki
The above composite photo of a firefly making its way around a particle accelerator was among this year’s nominees for the Global Physics Photowalk 2025. “Watching its glowing paths is like seeing the streaks of charged particles in a spark chamber or a Cherenkov detector — beautiful, fleeting and absolutely mesmerizing,” says photographer Yoshinari Sasaki.
Below, an animation shows a photo — and a progressively digitally enhanced version — of what could be the oldest known example of rock art in the world. The outline of a hand, dated to at least 67,800 years ago, was discovered in an Indonesian cave. It could be evidence for a controversial theory that early humans arrived in Sahul — the landmass that once encompassed modern-day Australia and New Guinea — by 65,000 years ago, around 15,000 years earlier than otherwise thought.
Credit: Maxime Aubert
A 33-year-old man was kept alive for 48 hours by an external artificial-lung system, after complications from a severe infection meant his lungs had to be removed. The system maintained the man’s oxygen levels and continuous blood flow across the heart — a first for an external lung device — until he could receive a double lung transplant. Operating the system currently requires multiple specialist teams, but the team who developed it hope it can be refined for use in any hospital.
Charity-funded hackathons are harnessing AI tools to find the genetic causes of rare diseases that haven’t been diagnosed until now. “If you don’t have a diagnosis, you are left behind,” says Helene Cederroth. She and her husband founded the Wilhelm Foundation, named after the eldest of their four children, three of whom died from an undiagnosed disease. The charity has sponsored events in the United States and Europe that draw on tools such as DeepMind’s AlphaGenome to help probe the ‘dark matter’ of non-coding DNA sequences for mutations that cause rare diseases.
Features & opinion
In Bad Influence, medically trained journalist Deborah Cohen examines the problems and opportunities that arise when people go online for health advice. The Internet has democratized medical information, Cohen argues, but has opened the door to social-media influencers who can spread conflicting information and unproven therapies. The book “is an essential read for anyone adrift in the ocean of conflicting online health claims — so basically, all of us”, writes Nature editor Helen Pearson in her review.
When will artificial intelligence systems achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), when defined as the ability to convincingly imitate the “broad, flexible cognitive competence” of a person? We’re already there, argue four scholars in philosophy, machine learning, linguistics and cognitive science who look back to a seminal 1950 paper by Alan Turing as their guide. Large language models can already chat convincingly, write passable poetry and prose, solve mathematics problems, propose scientific experiments and assist in writing computer code. “The machines Turing envisioned 75 years ago have finally arrived, in a form both more alien and more human than anyone imagined,” write the authors, who argue that recognizing this matters for understanding our minds and world.
Reference: Mind paper (from 1950)
From the woody scent of the library in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral to the aromatic odour of mummies at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, scientists are working to define and reproduce the smells of heritage and history. Some are going beyond analysing artefacts to imagining the ‘smellscapes’ of past cultural landmarks, such as the Battle of Waterloo and even Christian ‘hell’ as described in sixteenth-century sermons.
Knowable Magazine | 11 min read
Reference: Journal of the American Chemical Society paper
On Friday, Leif Penguinson was exploring Honey Island swamp in Louisiana. Did you find the penguin? When you’re ready, here’s the answer.
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