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This week's magazine

10 January 2026

Issue 3577

Â鶹´«Ã½ issue 3577 cover
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Editor's picks

Making autism into a partisan issue can only be harmful

Mind

Making autism into a partisan issue can only be harmful

Comment
What if the idea of the autism spectrum is completely wrong?

Mind

What if the idea of the autism spectrum is completely wrong?

Features
How rethinking your relationship with time could give you more of it

Mind

How rethinking your relationship with time could give you more of it

Features
A on pump transforms into a judge's gavel

Environment

The secret weapon that could finally force climate action

Features

Table of contents

Leaders

Making autism into a partisan issue can only be harmful

Mind

Making autism into a partisan issue can only be harmful

While US President Donald Trump and his administration are making false and debunked claims about the causes of autism, real research is improving our understanding of the condition

Comment

News

forensic crime scene

Health

Murder victim discovered to have two sets of DNA due to rare condition

A woman's body has been found to consist of varying proportions of male and female cells because of an extremely rare form of chimerism

News

Life

Human-plant hybrid cells reveal truth about dark DNA in our genome

News

Environment

The duo kite-skiing 4000 kilometres across Antarctica for science

News

Physics

Inside world's ultimate X-ray machine before it becomes more powerful

News

Health

Benefits of mRNA cancer vaccines could exceed $75 billion in US alone

News

Physics

Ghostly particles might just break our understanding of the universe

News

Space

Three supermassive black holes have been spotted merging into one

News

Space

Gargantuan black hole may be a remnant from the dawn of the universe

News

Technology

A strange kind of quantumness may be key to quantum computers' success

News

Environment

El Niño was linked to famines in Europe in the early modern period

News

Environment

US will need both carrots and sticks to reach net zero

News

Mathematics

Chess can be made fairer by rearranging the pieces

News

Space

Star that seemed to vanish more than 130 years ago is found again

News

Space

Rare Saturn-sized rogue planet is first to have its mass measured

News

Life

Jellyfish sleep about as much as humans do – and nap like us too

News

Humans

Was our earliest ancestor a knuckle-dragger, or did it walk upright?

News

Health

CAR T-cell therapy makes ageing guts heal themselves

News

Environment

Californian highway flooded by the king tide

News

Aperture

Maths Village - Piero Castellano Sirince (Izmir, Turkey)

Mathematics

These images explore a 'utopic' village built for teaching maths

The Nesin Mathematics Village in western Turkey was dreamed up by award-winning mathematician Ali Nesin to engage his students

Regulars

Features

A on pump transforms into a judge's gavel

Environment

The secret weapon that could finally force climate action

An ambitious form of climate modelling aims to pin the blame for disasters – from floods to heatwaves – on specific companies. Is this the tool we need to effectively prosecute the world’s biggest carbon emitters?

Features

Mind

What if the idea of the autism spectrum is completely wrong?

Features

Mind

How rethinking your relationship with time could give you more of it

Features

Culture

Ella Purnell (Lucy MacLean) in FALLOUT SEASON 2 Photo Credit: Lorenzo Sisti / Prime ?? Amazon Content Services LLC

Comment

The best new science-fiction shows of 2026

From Fallout and Gen Z Star Trek to the classic Neuromancer, you will be glued to the TV this year, says TV columnist Bethan Ackerley

Culture

Comment

The best new science documentaries of 2026

Culture

Comment

The science-fiction films to look forward to in 2026

Culture

More

This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a rare cosmic phenomenon called an Einstein ring. What at first appears to be a single, strangely shaped galaxy is actually two galaxies that are separated by a large distance. The closer foreground galaxy sits at the center of the image, while the more distant background galaxy appears to be wrapped around the closer galaxy, forming a ring.?? Einstein rings occur when light from a very distant object is bent (or ???lensed???) about a massive intermediate (or ???lensing???) object. This is possible because spacetime, the fabric of the Universe itself, is bent by mass, and therefore light travelling through space and time is bent as well. This effect is much too subtle to be observed on a local level, but it sometimes becomes clearly observable when dealing with curvatures of light on enormous, astronomical scales, such as when the light from one galaxy is bent around another galaxy or galaxy cluster. When the lensed object and the lensing object line up just so, the result is the distinctive Einstein ring shape, which appears as a full circle (as seen here) or a partial circle of light around the lensing object, depending on the precision of the alignment. Objects like these are the ideal laboratory in which to research galaxies too faint and distant to otherwise see. The lensing galaxy at the center of this Einstein ring is an elliptical galaxy, as can be seen from the galaxy???s bright core and smooth, featureless body. This galaxy belongs to a galaxy cluster named SMACSJ0028.2-7537. The lensed galaxy wrapped around the elliptical galaxy is a spiral galaxy. Even though its image has been warped as its light travelled around the galaxy in its path, individual star clusters and gas structures are clearly visible. The Webb data used in this image were taken as part of the Strong Lensing and Cluster Evolution (SLICE) survey (programme 5594), which is led by Guillaume Mahler at University of

Space

I'm calling it – 2026 is going to be the year of the galaxy

We are going to be getting a lot of exciting new information about galaxies in 2026, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who can't wait to see what it can tell us

Comment

Health

Why my 2026 fitness resolution is all about getting mobile

Regulars

Life

Why connecting with nature shouldn't mean disconnecting from science

Comment

Tom Gauld: Professor Monroe has all the luck...

Regulars

Twisteddoodles has some good news and some bad news

Regulars

Regulars

Three goats headbutt each other 1218 times in 12 hours

Three goats headbutt each other 1218 times in 12 hours

Feedback is delighted to discover the work of functional morphologist Nicole Ackermans, who has been watching a lengthy livestream of goats and counting how many times they butt heads

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

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