New Scientist

13 hours ago | newscientist.com | Carissa Wong

A norovirus vaccine pill that cuts the risk of infection could be available in a few years, after it showed promise in a trial where people were intentionally exposed to the virus. The highly contagious virus infects the stomach and intestines, causing vomiting and diarrhoea that typically resolve within a few days. “Billions are lost from the economy globally every year because of the lost days of work and hospitalisation,” says Sarah Caddy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

22 hours ago | newscientist.com | Carissa Wong

Parents could one day track how much breast milk their baby is drinking, thanks to a device that sends alerts to their smartphones in real time. “A common anxiety around breastfeeding is the uncertainty surrounding the amounts of breast milk that babies get,” says Daniel Robinson at Northwestern University in Illinois. “It increases stress for the breastfeeding mothers, parents and even the clinicians.” Undernourished infants may grow less quickly and, in extreme cases, can become dehydrated.

2 days ago | newscientist.com | Alex Wilkins

If advanced alien civilisations are building vast satellite swarms designed to harvest a star’s energy, we should be able to see them – so why haven’t we? One answer might be that these structures, known as Dyson spheres, will likely destroy themselves before we can spot one, according to new calculations. The idea of structures that can siphon off most of the energy from their stars was first proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in the 1960s.

2 days ago | newscientist.com | Jeremy Hsu

Chinese researchers have developed an extremely energy-efficient and low-cost technology for extracting uranium from seawater, a potential boon to the country’s nuclear power ambitions. China currently leads the world in building new nuclear power plants, and shoring up its supply of uranium will help these efforts. The world’s oceans hold an estimate 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium – more than 1000 times the uranium available in the ground – but it is extremely diluted.

5 days ago | newscientist.com | Jeremy Hsu

AI chatbots from tech companies such as OpenAI and Google have been getting so-called reasoning upgrades over the past months – ideally to make them better at giving us answers we can trust, but recent testing suggests they are sometimes doing worse than previous models. The errors made by chatbots, known as “hallucinations”, have been a problem from the start, and it is becoming clear we may never get rid of them.