Received this from a friend?
Sign up now to get every issue direct to your inbox each weekday

Diving seabirds feature in breathtaking entries for the 2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year competition. Plus: AI can tell a person's sex from brain scans.

Like what you see? Subscribe today to gain unlimited access to all our subscriber only content.

Kat Zhou/UPY 2024

Under the sea

Snowy-white northern gannets (Morus bassanus)  plunge into the icy waters of the North Sea in search of food in an action-packed photograph taken off the Shetland Islands in Scotland. The seabirds are almost as big as an albatross, with a wingspan of up to 180 centimetres. They are also uniquely adapted to high-speed diving, with strong neck muscles and nostrils inside their bills that can be closed to prevent water entering. The shot was one of the many spectacular entries to the 2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year competition, which celebrates the wonders of the marine world. See the image

Spot the difference

Are men’s and women’s brains all that different? A new way of investigating this question has concluded that they are – but it takes artificial intelligence (AI) to distinguish between them. Researchers recorded people’s brain activity while they lay in a functional MRI scanner and tracked changes in how different regions’ activity varies in sync with one another. After training the AI on this data, collected from about 1000 people, they put it to test on the brain scans of men and women it hadn’t seen before, finding it was about 90 per cent accurate at distinguishing between them. Read more

Gain instant access to our expert coverage of surprising new breakthroughs, including fresh insights into the daily lives of our ancestors when you subscribe.

More headlines

• What supp? Niacin supplements are linked to a greater risk of heart attacks and strokes.

• Not biting the dust: Cosmic dust may have been crucial to the beginnings of life.

• Potential cancer risk: Stem cells grown in labs for experimental therapies pose a risk for the condition.

Brandon Bourdages/Alamy

Thinking is hard work. Your brain accounts for around 2 per cent of your body weight but uses some 20 per cent of its energy. It doesn’t always feel like that, though: daydreaming, for example, seems like a breeze. But we have all experienced the feeling of fatigue that comes after a gruelling mental challenge. This suggests thinking hard requires even more energy. The surprising truth is it doesn’t. Instead, your brain has a metabolic trick that makes you feel exhausted to encourage you to give it a rest. Read more

Wednesday 21 February 2024 | 7pm EST

Learn all about the cosmic cocktail, including evidence for the existence of dark matter in galaxies. Last chance to register - only one day to go.

Christian Wolf at the Australian National University in Canberra on the monster black hole that powers the brightest known object in the universe.

Thanks for reading!

Alexandra Thompson

Assistant news editor, New Scientist
Email me at newsletter@newscientist.com

Received this from a friend? Sign up here

For the latest science and technology news, in-depth articles and video, visit newscientist.com