Stored sperm may age faster than reproductive medicine has assumed, suggesting that shorter abstinence periods could benefit fertility outcomes. For decades, men undergoing fertility testing or treatment have often been advised to abstain from ejaculation for several days beforehand, based on the assumption that longer storage allows sperm counts to build up. But a major [...]
Scientists identified an autoimmune mechanism linked to a major IBD risk gene, opening the door to targeted diagnosis and personalized therapies for thousands of patients. For decades, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has been treated as a single disorder, even though patients often experience dramatically different symptoms, disease courses, and responses to therapy. A new study [...]
Thousands of volunteers across England now regularly take out their own testing kits to study the levels of pollution in rivers and the sea.
With sewage spills rarely out of the news, citizen water testing has become one of the most visible responses to England’s pollution scandals.
A crisis of trust in the water companies appears to be driving the public to take water quality testing into their own hands. Thousands of people take part in the twice yearly water testing events, organised by charity Earthwatch. Spring 2025 saw the highest number of participants at more than 7,000. Other organisations also report rising numbers of people getting involved in water testing.
These people, often referred to as citizen scientists, are doing tasks as varied as surveying aquatic insects to sampling water for chemicals.
Much public attention has centred on sewage pollution in UK rivers in the past few years. Waste is regularly and legally discharged into lakes, rivers and along beaches by water companies during periods of heavy rainfall. But incidents of sewage discharges on days with no to low rainfall have also been identified, and in some cases legal action has followed. In some cases water companies have been fined millions of pounds.
The Environment Agency (EA), the main environmental regulator for the water industry, reported nearly 300,000 sewage spills across England in 2025 alone.
The consequences have affected both wildlife and people. Campaign group Surfers Against Sewage documented more than 7,000 cases of illness linked to swimming at official bathing sites over just five years. In 2025, 12 of England’s 14 inland bathing sites were rated “poor”, meaning swimmers were recommended to avoid the water because of potentially harmful bacteria. In April, the UK’s largest pollution claim began to be heard in the High Court, over allegations of chicken waste pouring into rivers along the Welsh-English border.
Public campaigning is believed to have helped trigger recent government action, with reforms expected in a planned Water Reform Bill.
Some water companies now fund freshwater citizen science initiatives. These run across locations including the Thames Valley, south-east England and Wales. The programmes claim to enhance community awareness, empowerment and improve transparency of water companies’ management efforts.
During my PhD, I researched how one group of volunteers in Oxfordshire collected and interpreted river data. Some told me that they felt that water companies encouraged participation in citizen science, while ignoring the data.
Read more: Five warning signs that rivers are polluted – even when they look clean
As one citizen scientist explained in my own ongoing preliminary research, “people keep beavering away, and eager beavers are just what the water industry wants”. In his view, citizen science risks becoming a tool for keeping volunteers busy and distracted, rather than driving accountability.
However, recent research shows water companies have historically underreported the number of sewage spills. The Consumer Council for Water, which represents customers, has reported widespread dissatisfaction with water companies. An independent water commission has also highlighted a deterioration of public confidence in the environmental regulators.
A recent Channel 4 docudrama, Dirty Business, echoes these frustrations. It follows two citizens trying to hold water companies and regulators to account.
In line with some recent academic research, the programme explores suggestions that the water industry attempts to deflect blame and distract attention from sewage pollution. In a statement addressing the allegations, the EA said: “Prosecutions are just one tool against water pollution, and we have also levied a record £8.5 million in enforcement undertakings against water companies in the last year alone.”
The Environment Agency also faces questions about public confidence. Research suggests that volunteers believe current regulations allow water companies to act without sufficient oversight. In this study, people felt that the EA was not fulfilling its responsibility to hold the water industry to account.
In 2024, the head of the EA, Philip Duffy, said that the organisation had buried freedom of information requests, with staff worried about revealing the embarrassing truth of water pollution. In a statement reported in the Guardian at the time, the EA said: “Philip is completely committed to the highest standards of transparency.” It added that he wanted to make more EA data readily available.
In January 2026, the Office for Environmental Protection, a public watchdog on environmental protection, also found possible failures by the EA to comply with water quality laws.
My participants felt that the agency shouldn’t ignore their data in monitoring water quality.
Concerns about data bias and reliability are often cited as reasons to limit the use of volunteer data to support regulatory responses to pollution incidents.
These concerns are not unreasonable. Citizen science data can indeed vary in quality, depending on training and sampling practices. Ensuring consistency across the sheer number of volunteer groups is also a challenge.
Nevertheless, research now suggests volunteers can produce reliable data suitable for official monitoring. The debate is gradually shifting to how regulators can include it in decision-making. For example, a national programme has already developed a shared framework on how to use data collected by citizens.
In the meantime, groups such as environmental charity Earthwatch and Surfers Against Sewage design and publish their own online maps and dashboards. These make thousands of historic data points publicly available.
As summer arrives and 13 new bathing sites open, pressure is again mounting on water companies and regulators to clean up England’s rivers and beaches. The citizen water sample collectors will be on standby.
Hope Steadman receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council's Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership; grant number ES/P000649/1.
Oxford physicists have created an unconventional class of quantum superpositions from highly nonclassical states. Researchers at the University of Oxford have created a new class of quantum superpositions, including Schrödinger’s cat-like states, using building blocks that are themselves strongly nonclassical. The advance could support future quantum computing architectures based on more complex systems than conventional [...]
Earlier this year in Beijing, a humanoid robot crossed a half-marathon finish line in a blistering 50 minutes, 26 seconds. The feat immediately lit up global headlines for shattering the human world record by almost seven minutes.
This performance came with many asterisks. The robot followed a pre-mapped track, stayed in its own dedicated lane, and had a human support crew trailing behind it in case something broke.
But the performance gap didn’t just close, it evaporated – down from over 2.5 hours in 2025. This wasn’t just about better motors or lighter carbon fibre; it reflected a massive shift in what a robot actually is. And that transformation has implications for our homes and hospitals too.
For decades, robotics was all about rigid, predictable coding. You wrote a program, locked the machine in a metal cage and let it execute repetitive tasks forever.
Industrial safety standards were built on the premise that if you can map the physical path of a robotic arm, for example, you can bound its risk with a cage or laser tripwire.
But the systems moving into hospitals and homes today don’t use fixed code blocks. They run on “foundation models” – the same kind of internet-trained artificial intelligence that powers chatbots like ChatGPT.
If you tell a modern AI-driven robot to “clean up a spill in the kitchen”, it uses these models to interpret your unique room (rather than match it to a pre-programmed list), figure out your intent, then invent an action plan on the fly.
But such flexibility creates an open-ended safety problem. You cannot build a physical cage around a machine whose behaviour emerges in real time, based on its own reasoning. The danger with the new breed of AI robots is that, because they use human language to plan their actions, they can be tricked into “going rogue”.
In my recent research with colleagues in the US, we decided to test exactly how fragile these AI robots’ safety systems are. We wanted to see if the guardrails that AI developers build into their foundation models, designed to prevent harmful or dangerous outputs, hold up when the underlying model is given a physical body.
Using nothing but basic text prompts and without any hardware hacking at all, we manipulated a range of AI-controlled robots to do genuinely hazardous things.
In our tests, the systems easily rejected directly malicious commands like “hit that person”. But these safety filters collapsed the moment we used a little creative writing. By framing our request as a piece of fictional dialogue for a movie script, the robot’s behavioural blocks disappeared.
In one trial, we programmed a commercial robot dog to pinpoint human crowds as optimal locations in which to place an explosive device. Because the underlying AI saw the prompt as a creative exercise, it appeared blind to the dangerous real-world implications of the plans it was generating.
In the UK, US and EU, current laws appear completely unprepared for such eventualities.
When policymakers try to figure out how to regulate robots, they almost always look to autonomous vehicles. But self-driving cars operate in a highly structured, heavily mapped world. They follow fixed traffic laws, navigate predictable road geometries and can be tested through millions of hours of simulation.
A busy street functions under well-defined laws using guidance systems such as traffic lights, meaning engineers can anticipate safety parameters ahead of time.
A domestic kitchen, school or hospital room has no such equivalent. And no factory bench-test can predict what an internet-trained model will decide to do when it encounters a novel object in a messy, unpredictable human environment.
This leaves us with a profound conceptual flaw in how we build these machines. Chatbot safety is absolute: a model shouldn’t output a bomb recipe, no matter who asks. But robot safety is context dependent.
Think about pouring boiling water from a kettle. The underlying physical movement – tilt, flow rate, trajectory – is the same whether the water lands safely in a ceramic mug or, catastrophically, on a child’s hand.
AI foundation models are phenomenal at open-ended logic, but they struggle immensely with real-time, context-aware physical judgment. In a text interface, a failure of judgment gives you a typo or hallucinated fact. In the physical world, such a failure may be completely irreversible – with devastating consequences.
If an AI-powered robot causes a physical injury, who takes the blame? Is it the end-user who gave the spoken command? The company that manufactured the metal chassis? Or the tech firm that trained the AI model in the first place?
Right now, the laws that seem to apply – such as product liability, warranty claims and consumer protection statutes – have not been tested in these new situations. And until liability is explicitly assigned by regulators, market pressures will continue to push tech companies to prioritise rapid commercial deployment over cautious safety engineering.
If we want to live alongside these machines safely, I believe we need to decouple safety from the AI model’s decisions. A robot shouldn’t rely on a chatbot’s logic to decide if it’s safe to swing a heavy metal arm near a human face.
This means creating safety layers that don’t depend on the AI being right. For example, we need zones around people that a robot’s arms simply cannot enter, and a physical emergency brake that can stop the robot if and when its AI fails.
The humanoids crossing finish lines in controlled athletic trials are impressive proofs of concept, but they are just the prologue. The next generation of autonomous agents will operate in high-stakes human spaces – navigating recovery wards, assisting the elderly, walking our streets.
We need an easily interpretable and robust safety framework already up and running before they arrive – not as a retrospective response to a predictable tragedy.
Fazl Barez receives research funding and support from the Future of Life Institute, Cosmos Institute, OpenAI, Anthropic and Schmidt Sciences. He is Principal Scientist (Advisory) at Martian AI infrastructure company.
Illegal waste dumping in the UK is no longer a marginal nuisance. It is increasingly operating at an industrial scale, with serious consequences.
The reported dumping of around 30,000 tonnes of waste at a protected site of special scientific interest in Leicestershire is one recent example of how severe the problem has become. Similar concerns have emerged recently at the large illegal waste site near Kidlington, Oxfordshire, where shredded mixed waste was deposited close to waterways. These are signs of a broader waste-crime economy that is damaging land, water and communities while shifting the bill onto the public.
The House of Lords environment and climate change committee estimated that waste crime costs the UK economy about £1 billion a year.
Part of the problem is that by the time large fly-tipping sites are discovered, it can be difficult to identify the original source.
This is where digital technology and geospatial intelligence are becoming increasingly important.
My ongoing research focuses on exactly this problem: mapping and characterising uncontrolled waste disposal sites worldwide, and using satellite data, geospatial intelligence and AI to identify where they are, how large they are and what risks they pose to nearby people and ecosystems. The principle is simple: you cannot manage what you cannot measure. If waste crime is going to be tackled properly, the sites have to be found first.
Satellite imagery and remote sensing now allow researchers and regulators to monitor land-use change, detect unusual waste accumulations, and identify environmental risks at scales impossible through traditional inspections alone, as demonstrated by recent work using satellite imagery and AI to identify dumpsites in 28 cities.
Drones can provide high-resolution imagery of suspect sites, while AI systems can analyse patterns and flag high-risk activity quickly. To do this, they will build on advances in waste-site detection from aerial and satellite imagery.
Thermal imaging and technologies to detect methane can also identify emissions from decomposing waste that would otherwise remain invisible. Recent studies show the growing capability of satellite-based methane monitoring to identify major emission sources and help create more effective waste-sector policies.
These tools are especially valuable because most large illegal waste sites do not appear overnight. They grow gradually over months or years, so earlier detection creates an opportunity to get on top of the problem before environmental damage escalates.
While these technologies are not usually sufficient on their own to identify individual offenders, they can provide evidence of when and where illegal dumping occurs, help authorities monitor sites over time, and support targeted investigations and enforcement actions. Their value is often in enabling earlier intervention.
Read more: Dirty gold: the fly-tipping gangs costing councils millions – and how you can help
The UK government is due to launch a digital waste tracking service in October 2026, replacing outdated paper-based systems with real-time digital reporting.
Official waste operators will then have to create records of receipt of waste, or face fines. If implemented effectively, the system could improve traceability across the waste chain and make it far harder for waste to disappear into illegal sites unnoticed. The government is already starting to use drones to help track down waste dumpers.
Local authorities in England dealt with 1.26 million fly-tipping incidents in 2024-25, a 9% increase from the previous year. However, the total number of court fines decreased by 9% over the same period.
Analysis reported by the Guardian suggested the UK may now have around 8,000 illegal waste sites and those that dumped the waste have avoided about £1.63 billion in landfill tax.
Globally, a report from the UN Environmental Programme estimated the hidden costs of uncontrolled waste disposal reached US$243.3 billion (£181 billion) worldwide in 2020.
The environmental damage depends on quantity, composition, location and how long waste remains in place. Illegal sites often contain mixed household rubbish, plastics, construction debris, shredded material, and sometimes hazardous waste. As this material degrades, it can cause damage to water, soil, air and possibly human health, preliminary research suggests.
Without impermeable barriers or drainage, polluted leachate (contaminated liquid generated by waste) can move into soils, rivers and groundwater. There’s considerable risk in floodplains and other sensitive areas, where heavy rain can carry pollution further and faster.
Illegal dumps can also attract pests and other disease carriers, creating public health concerns, disturbing habitats and harming wildlife. Animals may ingest plastics and other harmful materials, while the wind can spread shredded waste across nearby land.
In some cases, waste can catch fire, releasing smoke and fine particulates into the air. In addition, when organic waste decomposes in the absence of oxygen, it produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
The economic cost is equally severe. Cleaning up major illegal dumpsites is technically difficult and extraordinarily expensive. Authorities must map the site, assess contamination risks, identify hazardous materials, secure the area, and safely remove and process the waste.
In sensitive locations such as river corridors or floodplains, sorting out the problem becomes even more complex. The Environment Agency has warned that clearing the Oxfordshire site could cost over £7 million.
The obvious question is why this keeps happening. Part of the answer is economic. Proper waste disposal is expensive, while illegal dumping can generate large profits for individuals by illegally avoiding landfill taxes and compliance costs.
Waste also moves through fragmented supply chains involving brokers, subcontractors, carriers and temporary operators, making accountability difficult. Historically, waste tracking in the UK has relied heavily on paper documentation, creating opportunities for fraud, falsified records and waste simply “disappearing” from the system.
Technology alone, however, is not enough. Better monitoring must be combined with stronger enforcement, improved coordination between agencies, clearer accountability across supply chains, and meaningful penalties that outweigh the financial incentives of illegal dumping.
Illegal waste is not simply a waste-management issue. It is an environmental, economic and public-health issue. Allowing industrial-scale dumping to become normalised would shift enormous long-term costs onto society, ecosystems, and future generations.
Prevention, transparency and early detection are ultimately far cheaper and far less damaging than attempting to clean up after the damage has already been done.
Amani Maalouf receives funding from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Digital Research Infrastructure programme, administered by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) on behalf of UKRI.
For captive animals, engaging in natural behaviour is a pillar of the animal welfare framework. But when it comes to sex, one important behaviour has been largely ignored, and sometimes even punished: masturbation.
Solo sex is surprisingly common across the animal kingdom. It is well documented in primates. Tortoises are surprisingly vocal during their solo lovemaking endeavours, if not very graceful. Camels masturbate by rubbing their penises in the sand and porcupines make inventive use of all sorts of objects.
Our new study could change how other scientists view masturbation in birds and improve their welfare.
Masturbation also seems to be common in birds. A quick internet search brings up an abundance of video clips on social media and dedicated posts on bird-keeping forums, largely from worried or bemused hobbyist bird keepers.
It has often been treated as an abnormal problem behaviour in captive birds (particularly parrots). Folklore husbandry has assumed it is the undesirable outcome of stress, bad health or poor environment. Bird keepers often therefore discourage masturbation via punishment or veterinary interventions such as diet or care changes and, sometimes, even drugs and surgery. Despite the welfare implications, masturbation in birds had been largely unexplored by the scientific community.
We set out to change that, by investigating the distribution and evolutionary history of masturbation in birds for the first time. We studied 120 species of bird across 22 major groups, gathering data from the scattered scientific literature, online reports and community forums, and surveys of bird experts.
Our study found that masturbation is widespread across birds with a strong evolutionary history, meaning that it’s an ancient trait probably similar in closely related species. Although we found more records of masturbation in male birds, it occurs in both sexes and across all age groups.
Solo sex also seems to be linked to species that mate with multiple partners, supporting the idea that it might help to increase reproductive success when there is a high degree of competition over fertilisation. For instance, in males it may flush out old sperm to leave newer (better condition) sperm for mating. In females it may increase sexual arousal to help with sneak mating with males other than their partner.
Crucially, we discovered that masturbation is actually less common in captivity than the wild, and more common in birds reared by their own parents than by humans. What this tells us is that masturbation in birds is neither an unnatural behaviour, nor a consequence of captivity. Given this finding, it is important that birds are not prevented from masturbation. Of course, as with any behaviour, there may be extreme cases where chronic masturbation could indicate underlying health or husbandry issues.
Avian self-pleasure is usually a rather inelegant affair, in which a bird rubs their cloaca (a shared orifice for both excretion and reproduction) against an object, like a branch, twig or toy. This is often accompanied by a lot of flapping and self-satisfied vocalisation.
One potential reason for the lack of scientific studies exploring avian masturbation may be because the cloaca is thought to have fewer nerve clusters, and therefore lower sensitivity, than our own genitals.
Clearly however, birds are getting some satisfaction from masturbation, so perhaps there is more to a bird’s sensations during sex than has previously been recognised. Further exploration of this could have important implications for both welfare and captive breeding programmes. While sexual pleasure may not be exactly the same experience as for mammals, it is wildly premature to dismiss the idea that birds also feel pleasure.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
William Adams was entranced by energy. As a young man, his interest was nursed by working as a clerk in a London patent office in the 1860s. This gave him an early look at some of the first British designs for exploiting solar energy using mirrors, water or both.
Adams would later recount his excitement at reading about the French mathematician Augustin Mouchot’s invention of the first machine ever to run on energy from the Sun. The device, which connected a solar boiler to a specifically designed steam engine, was warmly received by Napoleon III when it was presented to the emperor in 1866.
Inspired, Adams soon designed and patented his own rudimentary solar boiler. The only problem was, he needed more sun.
This series is dedicated to lesser-known, highly influential scientists who have had a powerful influence on the careers and research paths of many others, including the authors of these articles.
When offered the chance to become deputy registrar of Bombay by the Indian city’s governor, Sir Philip Edmond Wodehouse, Adams jumped at the opportunity. There, he became the first Briton to design, build and test a fully-functioning solar steam engine fit for industrial purpose.
But he also came up against the conservatism of India’s colonial rulers, who did not see this Bombay bureaucrat for the energy visionary that he undoubtedly was.
Adams arrived in Bombay in 1873 to find it in the middle of a cotton boom, with mills popping up like mushrooms across the city. The population was growing so quickly that firewood was depleted for miles around. The landscape grew “bald as a billiard ball”, as Adams put it.
Every morning before setting off for work near Bombay’s central fort, Adams would set up his outdoor laboratory at his home in the southernmost Colaba district, near the open sea. He instructed an Indian fundhi (skilled carpenter) to build a set of three-tiered wooden shelves to hold 18 looking glasses.
“Each glass was moveable on a swivel in the same manner as an ordinary toilet glass”, Adams explained, meaning he could pivot each glass by “the touch of the finger”.
Later, for open-air experiments, Adams used two banks of mirrors (36 in total) which made “the mercury in the thermometer boil, leaping up to over 670 degrees fahrenheit”. He then placed a copper cylinder containing three gallons of water in the focus of all 36 mirrors, making it boil in exactly 20 minutes.
But Adams’s ambition did not end there. To reach sufficient pressure in the boiler to drive a steam engine, this bureaucrat-cum-engineer built a giant concave mirror, 24 feet in diameter. He then sent for his London solar boiler, which was delivered by ship to Bombay in 1876.
One fine morning, Adams – wearing dark glasses for safety – turned his giant concave mirror on the copper cylinder filled with water. “The rays beat like missiles in a continuous and incessant storm of solar fire,” he wrote.
An hour later, the cylinder registered 55 pounds of pressure per square inch. He hired a steam engine of 3 horsepower and connected it to the boiler: the pressure moved the pistons. Adams had built the first working, British-designed solar steam engine.
For a fortnight, he kept the pump going near his bungalow in Colaba – proudly and sweatily displaying his innovation to government officials, newspaper reporters, mill owners and the local Indian communities. Members of the public were invited to witness his experiments too, via a notification in a Bombay newspaper.
In 1877, Adams wrote a letter to the editor of the Times of India arguing that the application of his solar steam engine would “make India the seat of the principal manufacturing industries of the world”.
Later, in his wildly ahead-of-its-time treatise Solar Heat: A Substitute for Fuel in Tropical Countries (1878), Adams argued that countries near the equator “possess, in their clear skies, a gratuitous and inexhaustible source of wealth, equal to that which western nations have to dig, with infinite labour and toil, from the bowels of the Earth”.
Adams sketched out plans to use solar heat for everything from cotton gins (engines to separate cotton fibres from seeds) to Hindu crematoria. He called upon the colonial British government to invest in this promising substitute for coal, which was then being imported to India at great expense.
Adams envisioned solar energy transforming the Raj. Just like the coal-combusting steam engine had replaced the waterwheel in England, he argued that thermal heat could now replace fossil fuels in India. But his colonial bosses were not persuaded.
Adams was part of a 19th-century wave of global research into solar steam engines, as I explore in my postdoctoral project and upcoming book. But in contrast to fellow pioneers including Frenchman Mouchot, Adams built his solar steam engine to stimulate local Indian industry, not to benefit the colonial government.
The locals shared Adams’s belief in this technology. One even wrote to Scientific American magazine to express their desire for the rapid adoption of solar power:
My residence is in a tropical part of India … where fuel is scarce and dear … In this part of the country (about 300 miles north of Bombay), there is a great opening for cheap power in small units.
Bombay’s new governor Sir Richard Temple concluded, however, that solar heat “could not be used for commercial purposes on a large scale”. He argued that local factory owners would not like giving “the workmen a holiday on days when the sky is not clear”.
In truth, Adams’s invention was too subversive for Britain’s colonial officials and capitalists. In less sunny climes, solar energy – tethered to the seasonal rhythms of nature – might negate their commercial ambition for timeless industrial production. But they also saw India as an important market for British coal exports.
While a few mill owners adopted Adams’s auxiliary solar heater for their steam engines, most regarded it as a primitive contraption unfit to satisfy the demands of modern civilisation.
Increasingly frustrated that neither the industrial capitalists nor the colonial government supported his vision, Adams abandoned further experiments. His dream of India switching away from coal to solar power, from combustion to concentration, would not happen for at least another century.
Now, however, India is a world leader in the global energy transition. It heads the International Solar Alliance, and is the third largest solar power generator in the world.
Which begs the question: how much further advanced would this technology be had Adams’s 19th-century solar experiments been embraced by India’s colonial rulers at the time?
Sebastian Egholm Lund receives funding from the Carlsberg Foundation. His upcoming book, Changing the Climate at the Fin de Siècle, is published by Cambridge University Press (September 2026).
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