Fossil teeth may come from a new species of early hominin 13. August 2025 (18:00) Some 2.6-million-year-old teeth found in Ethiopia hint that an unknown species from the Australopithecus genus coexisted with one of our Homo relatives, but it is hard to draw firm conclusions from the evidence(New Scientist)
GPT-5's modest gains suggest AI progress is slowing down 13. August 2025 (15:40) OpenAI’s latest large language model has achieved seemingly underwhelming improvements in performance, leading to questions about whether the AI industry can make significant advancements with its current designs(New Scientist)
Why a mysterious group of ancient humans doesn’t have a species name 12. August 2025 (20:00) An extinct group of humans that were once widespread in Asia don’t have an official species name – part of the reason is archaeological, and part is a legal question(New Scientist)
The real reason why we lost the ability to make vitamin C 12. August 2025 (19:00) The textbooks say our ancestors lost the ability to make vitamin C because we didn't need it, but the loss may have protected us from some parasites(New Scientist)
How AI poisoning is fighting bots that hoover data without permission 12. August 2025 (18:00) The web is awash with bots that scrape data without permission. Now content creators are poisoning the well of artificial intelligence – but similar technology can also be used to spread misinformation(New Scientist)
Social media toxicity can't be fixed by changing the algorithms 12. August 2025 (17:00) Experiments involving AI chatbots interacting on a simulated social media platform suggest efforts to design out antagonistic user behaviour will not succeed(New Scientist)
