British fertility clinics raise scientific and ethical objections over patients sending embryos’ genetic data abroad for analysis

• What is polygenic embryo screening in IVF and does it work?

Couples undergoing IVF in the UK are exploiting an apparent legal loophole to rank their embryos based on genetic predictions of IQ, height and health, the Guardian has learned.

The controversial screening technique, which scores embryos based on their DNA, is not permitted at UK fertility clinics and critics have raised scientific and ethical objections, saying the method is unproven. But under data protection laws, patients can – and in some cases have – demanded their embryos’ raw genetic data and sent it abroad for analysis in an effort to have smarter, healthier children.

‘Soilsmology’ aims to map world’s soils and help avert famine, says not-for-profit co-founded by George Monbiot

• George Monbiot: Over a pint in Oxford, we may well have stumbled upon the holy grail of agriculture

A groundbreaking soil-health measuring technique could help avert famine and drought, scientists have said.

At the moment, scientists have to dig lots of holes to study the soil, which is time-consuming and damages its structure, making the sampling less accurate.

Former Perth curator Mark Harvey is one of the few people on Earth to have described 1,000 new species, many of them arachnids. Colleagues say his legacy is ‘unquantifiable’

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For most people around the world, 16 August 1977 was memorable because it was the day Elvis Presley died.

“We turned the radio on when we got back in the car and that was the headline. Elvis was dead,� remembers Dr Mark Harvey.

Pesticide Action Network Europe study finds average concentrations 100 times higher than in tap water

High levels of a toxic “forever chemical� have been found in cereal products across Europe because of its presence in pesticides.

The most contaminated food is breakfast cereal, according to a study by Pesticide Action Network Europe (PAN), with average concentrations 100 times higher than in tap water.

Some say it’s overdiagnosis, others say it’s greater recognition. But it’s clear we must think about how our society is impacting human development

• Gabor Maté is the author of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Does the rise in diagnoses of ADHD mean that normal feelings are being “over-pathologised�? The UK’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, seems to suspect so. He is said to be so concerned about a sharp rise in the number of people claiming sickness benefits that he has ordered a clinical review of the diagnosis of mental health conditions, and autism and ADHD.

I was diagnosed with ADHD (ADD, as it was then most often called) decades ago, in my early 50s. As I wrote in my book on the subject, Scattered Minds, it “seemed to explain many of my behaviour patterns, thought processes, childish emotional reactions, my workaholism and other addictive tendencies, the sudden eruptions of bad temper and complete irrationality, the conflicts in my marriage and my Jekyll and Hyde ways of relating to my children … It also explained my propensity to bump into doorways, hit my head on shelves, drop objects, and brush close to people before I notice they are there.�

Gabor Maté is an international public speaker and retired physician. His most recent book is The Myth of Normal: Illness, Health and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Science editor Ian Sample sits down with co-host Madeleine Finlay and science correspondent Hannah Devlin to hear about three eye-catching stories from the week, including a study showing that the brain has five ‘eras’, with adult mode not starting until our early 30s. Also on the agenda is new research showing the shingles vaccine not only protects against dementia but could actually slow its progress, and a paper exploring how ants sacrifice themselves when they become infected with pathogens to protect their healthy relatives

Clips: BBC

Brain has five ‘eras’, scientists say – with adult mode not starting until early 30s

Residents report homes shaking from quake with epicentre near the village of Silverdale in Lancashire

Residents were shaken by what felt like an “underground explosion� after England’s strongest earthquake in two years affected towns and villages across Lancashire and Cumbria.

A 3.3-magnitude earthquake was felt as far as 30 miles from the epicentre near the coastal village of Silverdale in Lancashire shortly after 11.23pm on Wednesday, with reports of tremors being felt in Blackpool.

Paper published in 2000 found glyphosate was not harmful, while internal emails later revealed company’s influence

The journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology has formally retracted a sweeping scientific paper published in 2000 that became a key defense for Monsanto’s claim that Roundup herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate don’t cause cancer.

Martin van den Berg, the journal’s editor in chief, said in a note accompanying the retraction that he had taken the step because of “serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented�.

The paper, titled Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans, concluded that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weed killers posed no health risks to humans – no cancer risks, no reproductive risks, no adverse effects on development of endocrine systems in people or animals.

Vinay Prasad memo said at least 10 children had died from Covid vaccination – but offered scant evidence for claim

America’s top vaccines official promised, in a long and argumentative memo to staff on Friday, to revamp vaccine regulation after claiming that at least 10 children died from Covid vaccination – but he offered no evidence for that allegation and scant details on the new approach.

The top-down changes, without input from outside advisers or publication of data, worry experts who fear vaccines such as the flu shot may quickly disappear and that public trust will take a major hit.

Richard Pazdur’s potential retirement weeks into the role adds to upheaval at the FDA amid political pressure

The top drug regulator in the US signaled on Tuesday he may retire weeks after accepting the position, adding to upheaval in the highest ranks of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

If Richard Pazdur retires, finding a replacement would be challenging amid mounting political pressure and internal conflict at the agency, sources say.

White Coat Waste finds $1.7m in NIH grants for cat research months after officials said they were working to end studies

The US National Institutes of Health is continuing to fund new laboratory experiments on cats despite saying that they are “working tirelessly� to “phase out� such projects.

In July this year, Dr Nicole Kleinstreuer, the NIH acting deputy director, announced in a podcast with Dr Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, that she did not think the NIH should do research on dogs or cats. On the Director’s Desk: The Future of Animal Models in Research, Dr Kleinstreuer said: “I think it’s unconscionable� and “to phase them out, we are working tirelessly behind the scenes�. However, she added the NIH was constrained under the law to leave existing grants in place.

I knew that a revolution in our understanding of soil could change the world. Then came a eureka moment – and the birth of the Earth Rover Program

• Report: Experts say seismic waves can check soil health and boost yields

It felt like walking up a mountain during a temperature inversion. You struggle through fog so dense you can scarcely see where you’re going. Suddenly, you break through the top of the cloud, and the world is laid out before you. It was that rare and remarkable thing: a eureka moment.

For the past three years, I’d been struggling with a big and frustrating problem. In researching my book Regenesis, I’d been working closely with Iain Tolhurst (Tolly), a pioneering farmer who had pulled off something extraordinary. Almost everywhere, high-yield farming means major environmental harm, due to the amount of fertiliser, pesticides and (sometimes) irrigation water and deep ploughing required. Most farms with apparently small environmental impacts produce low yields. This, in reality, means high impacts, as more land is needed to produce a given amount of food. But Tolly has found the holy grail of agriculture: high and rising yields with minimal environmental harm.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

There is nothing wrong with questioning the mighty cost of the lockdowns, but we can’t let hardline libertarians rewrite Britain’s pandemic history

That number will stay fixed for ever in public memory: 23,000 people died because Boris Johnson resisted locking the country down in time. As Covid swept in, and with horrific images of Italian temporary morgues in tents, he went on holiday and took no calls. With the NHS bracing to be “overwhelmed� by the virus, he rode his new motorbike, walked his dog and hosted friends at Chevening.

Nothing is surprising about that: he was ejected from Downing Street and later stepped down as an MP largely for partying and lying to parliament about it. Everyone knew he was a self-aggrandising fantasist with a “toxic and chaotic culture� around him. But this is not just about one narcissistic politician. It’s about his entire rightwing coterie of libertarians and their lethally dominant creed in the UK media.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

New technologies can reduce our reliance on animal experiments. This isn’t just morally right, it could have scientific and economic benefits too

Science is a slaughterhouse. We rarely acknowledge the degree to which animal life underwrites the research that provides us with medicines, or the regulation that keeps us safe. Live animals were used in 2.64m officially sanctioned scientific procedures in the UK in 2024, many of them distressing or painful and many of them fatal. But the government’s new strategy to phase out animal testing – published earlier this month – suggests that in the near future emerging technologies can largely replace the use of animals in our scientific endeavours.

The UK previously banned cosmetics testing on animals, and has already taken steps to regulate and reduce their use in research. But some needlessly cruel experiments still take place: the forced swim test (FST) for example, in which a rodent is placed in a body of water it cannot escape and researchers measure whether antidepressants extend the time it struggles for life. The government says no new FST licences will be granted, in effect banning it. Similar targets are set over the next few years to end the testing of caustic chemicals on eyes and skin.

The story has sparked debates about cryogenics and fidelity. But it also tells us something deeper about our responses to loss

One of the last remaining fun things about the internet is getting to pass judgment on the goings-on in households that you would never hear about otherwise. On Reddit, for instance, there is a whole thriving sub for just this purpose called Am I the Asshole?, where people describe conflicts from their lives and ask strangers to adjudicate on them.

This week, a story on the BBC threw up a particularly juicy piece of other people’s business that has been sparking debates on Chinese social media. It starts in 2017, when Gui Junmin decided to cryogenically freeze his wife, Zhan Wenlian, after she died of lung cancer. She was the first person in China to undergo this procedure, which was paid for by a science research institute in Jinan, east China, that agreed with Gui to preserve his wife’s body for 30 years. Reports suggest Zhan herself consented to the process before she passed away.

Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Artificial intelligence can execute tasks in seconds that once took humans hours, if not days to complete. While this may be great for productivity, some researchers are concerned that our increasing use of AI could be impacting our ability to tackle difficult problems and think critically. To find out where the science stands, and how worried we should be about the potential of AI to change how we think, Ian Sample hears from Madeleine Finlay and Sam Gilbert, professor of neuroscience at University College London

Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?

Watch Life Invisible, the Guardian’s new documentary about the hunt for life saving antibiotics in Chile’s Atacama Desert

Patrick Vallance, the minister for science, research and innovation, recently unveiled a plan to cut animal testing through greater use of AI and other technologies, with the eventual aim of phasing it out altogether. To understand how this will affect research and what could be used in place of animal models, Madeleine Finlay hears from science editor Ian Sample, Prof Hazel Screen of Queen Mary University London and Prof Kevin Harrington from the Institute of Cancer Research

UK minister unveils plan to cut animal testing through greater use of AI

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After bitter arguments, threatened walkouts and heated all-night negotiations, delegates eventually reached a deal this weekend at the Cop30 climate summit in Brazil. To unpick what was achieved and what was left out, Madeleine Finlay hears from the Guardian’s environment editor, Fiona Harvey, who has been following every twist and turn

End of fossil fuel era inches closer as Cop30 deal agreed after bitter standoff

Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod

Astrophysicist Prof Tomonori Totani says research could be crucial breakthrough in search for elusive substance

Nearly a century ago, scientists proposed that a mysterious invisible substance they named dark matter clumped around galaxies and formed a cosmic web across the universe.

What dark matter is made from, and whether it is even real, are still open questions, but according to a study, the first direct evidence of the substance may finally have been glimpsed.

Scientists have developed algorithms that give predictive scores for a host of physical and mental traits

• UK IVF couples use legal loophole to rank embryos based on potential IQ, height and health

The Guardian has learned that couples undergoing IVF in the UK are exploiting an apparent legal loophole to rank their embryos based on genetic predictions of IQ. But what is polygenic screening and does it work?

It borders Brazil, but French Guiana is now a remote outpost of the EU. It is home to Europe’s only spaceport, some of the most biodiverse forest on the planet and a military mission that is testing the limits of western power

Above me, a ceiling of rough wooden branches and tarp. To my right, an officer in the French Foreign Legion types up the daily situation report. In front of me a French gendarme named David is standing in front of a table full of large assault rifles, pointing out locations on a paper map. A generator hums. All around us, splotches of forest dot the hundreds of islands that make up the archipelago of Petit-Saut, a watery ecosystem three times the size of Paris.

Except Paris is 7,000 kilometres away from where I am, in Guyane, or French Guiana, a department of France in South America, just north of the equator.

The “solution� to today’s puzzle

Earlier today I set a puzzle which is extremely hard to answer if you are not a soap bubble.

The four towns

The minimum you can do

UPDATE: Read the solution here

Today’s puzzle is about transport links and soapy water.

The four towns

The solution to today’s poison puzzler

Earlier today I set you the following puzzle. Here it is again with the solution.

Two dead at the drink-off

Who poisoned whom?

UPDATE: Read the solution here

Today’s puzzle is credited to Michael Rabin, the legendary computer scientist, who in the late 1980s posted it to an electronic bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University.

It has recently been brought to light by a puzzle enthusiast who thinks it deserves to be better known. I agree – it’s an all time classic.

Blue Origin successfully launches its huge New Glenn rocket on Thursday with a pair of Nasa spacecraft destined for Mars. It is only the second flight of the rocket that Jeff Bezos's company and Nasa are counting on to ferry people and supplies to the moon. The 321ft (98-meter) New Glenn blasts into the afternoon sky from the Cape Canaveral space force station, sending Nasa's twin Mars orbiters on a long journey to the red planet. Company employees cheer wildly as the booster lands upright on a barge 375 miles (600km) offshore while an ecstatic Bezos watches the action from launch control

• Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin launches rocket carrying twin Nasa spacecraft to Mars

The largest supermoon of the year, the so-called ‘beaver’ moon on Wednesday 4 November, was the biggest and brightest of 2025, just 357,000km from Earth

• Watch November’s ‘beaver’ supermoon rising over Sydney’s Bondi beach – video

• Glowing September supermoon lights up the sky – in pictures

Luxembourg — one of the world’s smallest nations — has positioned itself at the forefront of asteroid mining. But extracting minerals and precious metals from space throws up all sorts of ethical and legal questions, such as who can lay claim to an asteroid and all of its extractive wealth, and should space benefit “all of humankind�, as the international treaties signed in the 60s intended? Nevertheless, Luxembourg has lured a multinational cast of space entrepreneurs with the potential to invest in the promise of an untapped trillion dollar industry. Josh Toussaint-Strauss finds out how Luxembourg became a global hub for space mining, and whether it’s promised ‘gold rush’ will ever materialize