The government did not throw a ‘protective ring’ around social care, and vulnerable people were left exposed

The families of the 43,000 care home residents in the UK whose deaths between March 2020 and July 2022 were either caused by, or contributed to, by the Covid pandemic, have waited a long time for the official verdict on the way they were treated. The report published on Tuesday confirmed what many have been saying for a long time. In the first, panicked stages of lockdown, residents and their care workers were “something of an afterthought”. The “protective ring” around care homes referred to by Matt Hancock, the former health and care secretary, was a fiction.

These are scathing judgments. What actually happened, starting in March 2020, was that about 30,000 people were discharged from hospital to care homes in order to free up beds for Covid-19 patients. Since there were not enough tests for all of them, those without symptoms were moved without being tested. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, there was no instruction to isolate newly arrived residents until the second half of April (in Scotland, this happened earlier).

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.

Five-month-old Esta High died at Leeds General Infirmary in November 2023 after doctors put her symptoms down to Covid-19

A baby girl who died from meningitis may have been saved if doctors had tested her for the infection sooner, rather than putting her symptoms down to Covid, an inquest jury has found.

Five-month-old Esta High died at Leeds General Infirmary in November 2023, days after she was taken into the emergency department with a high temperature and vomiting.

Lawyers tell inquiry that patients’ lives are at stake through improper use of Oxevision system for most vulnerable

Families bereaved by the misuse of an “intrusive” camera monitoring system for vulnerable patients used in half of England’s mental health wards have called for it to be banned to help prevent more avoidable deaths.

Lawyers for the families said “patients’ lives are at stake” by the continuing use of Oxevision, the Lampard inquiry into mental health deaths in Essex heard on Tuesday.

Inquiry chair says failure to advise care homes to isolate people discharged from hospital was ‘significant oversight’

Government failures caused Covid-19 to spread “like wildfire” among vulnerable and elderly people, and Matt Hancock’s “protective ring” around care homes did not exist, a public inquiry has found.

Heather Hallett, who is leading the Covid-19 inquiry, said the care sector was an “afterthought” and rejected the former health secretary’s long-held claim that he threw a “protective ring” around care homes from the start of the pandemic, saying it was “unfounded” and the “opposite was true”.

Rise in economic hardship and changes in attitudes towards migration could explain drop in support, experts say

Public support for the NHS’s founding principles – that it is free to use, available to everyone and tax-funded – has fallen over the last five years, research has shown.

Backing for all three pillars dropped between 2021 and 2025 across the UK population, except for a small rise in millennials’ support for the NHS being funded from taxation.

Pennsylvania's health department issued a health alert Monday as cases of measles in pregnancy and, in turn, cases of congenital measles have continued to increase. Before the current outbreak—which continues to rage across the state—congenital measles cases hadn't been seen in decades, the department noted in its advisory.

The alert included detailed clinical guidance for managing measles exposures and cases during pregnancy as well as cases in newborns. Many doctors have never seen such cases in their careers given the decades of successful use of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. But now, with vaccination rates slipping nationwide, the highly infectious virus is better able to get footholds in communities and spread rapidly through under-vaccinated pockets, as is happening in Pennsylvania.

As of October 19, Pennsylvania had reported 1,286 measles cases this year across 42 counties. Of those, 247 have been hospitalized, and six people have reportedly died (though the latest reported death is still pending an investigation by the state health department before it is added to the state tally).

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System can estimate a person’s biological age and predict chances of cancer survival from a single photograph

Doctors have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can predict a cancer patient’s chances of survival from a single photograph of their face.

The AI system was custom-built by experts at Mass General Brigham, a nonprofit, integrated academic healthcare system in Massachusetts, to estimate biological age and directly predict survival outcomes in patients diagnosed with cancer.

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Sadly, we did not manage to abolish Daylight Saving time changes during that brief, hopeful moment a few years back, so in just a few weeks we will all be going ahead with our usual ritual: Wake up early, forgetting that the time changed during the night, then get confused when the time on our phone doesn’t match the one on the microwave. Here’s how to be a little more prepared.

Know exactly when daylight saving time ends

Daylight saving time is what we call the time in summer, and yes, it’s daylight “saving” time, singular. This time actually gets its own time zone abbreviation: EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) instead of EST (Eastern Standard Time) on the east coast, with corresponding CDT, MDT, and PDT across the country. So in November we change from daylight time to standard time.

Specifically, daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 1, 2026. That’s when the clocks “fall back.” (In the spring, they "spring forward"—get it?) If you’re changing your clocks manually, 2 a.m. becomes 1 a.m. This means that if you’re used to waking up at 7 a.m., you’ll open your eyes after sleeping the usual amount of time to find that it is now 6 a.m.

Decide how to spend your “extra” hour

The fall time change is a great moment for me, a night owl. When I was younger I would be thrilled to stay up an extra hour and still not feel excessively tired in the morning. These days, I’m more likely to use the time change as an assist to my morning routine. I’ll be up at 6:30 (for example) instead of 7:30, and I can get in an early workout or do some journaling.

If you’re more of a morning person, this may be a bit less pleasant. You’re going to fall asleep watching TV in the evening—earlier than you usually do, anyway. Maybe you should try to stay up a bit, to get a head start on shifting your routine an hour later.

Start adjusting pets' and kids' schedules now

For the creatures in your house who are blissfully ignorant of the concept of standardized time, routines are about to get a little weird. Most importantly: They’ll get hungry (and everything else) an hour earlier than usual.

If you think ahead, you can start moving breakfast time later, before the time change arrives. Instead of feeding your dog at 7, start feeding him at 7:15 now, and you’ll be less likely to get a cold nose in the face at 6 a.m. (Since we have about two weeks from this writing, you can shift the time to 7:30 after a few days, and then 7:45. You get the idea.)

Same goes for kids: Expect them to wake up an hour before the clock says they should, and to get tired (and overtired) an hour earlier than they normally would. A gradual shifting of routines will help here as well, and you may want to explain the situation ahead of time to kids who are old enough to understand. And if you expect your own tummy to be grumbling on cue? Consider a gradual change in mealtimes for yourself, as well, or at least have a snack on hand in case you need it.

Expect a colder, darker evening

When daylight saving time ends, we stop “saving” that extra hour of sunlight in the evening. Your evening workout or your evening commute will be darker and colder than before. On the bright side, we’ll see light earlier in the morning, which can be a good excuse to take a morning walk you might not otherwise take. (Morning light and morning exercise both help to set your body clock and may put you in a better mood for the day to come.)

If you head outside for exercise in the evening, check out our guide to how to layer for an outdoor run, depending on the temperature. You may also want to bring a flashlight or wear a headlamp. Here's the one I use.

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Revisit your bedtime routine

It may be easier to wake up after the time change, but the flip side is that it may be harder to go to bed. This is a good time to take a look at your bedtime routine, or even to create a bedtime routine if you haven’t really had one.

I have a guide to good sleep hygiene here, but one of the most important tips is to give yourself a wind-down time in the evening—30 minutes minimum—where the lights are dim and you aren’t staring at a screen. It’s a good time to take a bath, read a book, or do something else you find relaxing. Soon you’ll be locked in to your new schedule—at least until our next time change in the spring.

Roger Steer says the solution is to adopt the NHS model, Janet Dubé suggests an audit, while Sally Byers says language that respects people living with dementia is crucial

Polly Toynbee asks a seemingly difficult question and discusses a knotty issue (In Liverpool I saw the tough choices Louise Casey faces on social care – starting with who will pay?, 13 October). Her question is framed as an issue of individual choice inviting the response: “Not me if I can avoid it.”

The responsible answer is, of course, all of us – collectively. It is an uninsurable risk that can only be solved equitably and efficiently as a collective solution. By entangling the issue of funding with provision of services, moral clarity is lost. Issues of matching funding distort and influence the level of care provided and ensure that progress toward resolving the question of who determines the need for care is delayed.

Letter from 150 scientists, MPs and activists calls for action to protect lower-income and minority-ethnic communities

The government must hold an inquiry into the unequal impacts of air pollution, 150 scientists, MPs and activists have urged.

Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that across England, lower-income areas have persistently higher levels of air pollution than wealthier areas.

Warning for other Arctic communities as residents told not to use water in Longyearbyen in Svalbard, one of the fastest-warming places in the world

Residents of a remote town in Norway that is in one of the fastest-warming places in the world have been told they must no longer drink tap water due to heavy metal contamination that scientists have linked to the thawing permafrost.

Longyearbyen, in the archipelago of Svalbard, gets its main drinking water supply from a 1.5 mile-long (2.5km) dammed lake called Isdammen, or “ice pond”. Higher temperatures as a result of the climate crisis have thawed permafrost, leading to newly exposed bedrock leaching metals into the pond.

Exclusive: NHS Alliance’s acute care director says centralisation of services ‘inevitable’ to ensure safe care

• Why are some NHS maternity units facing closure?

Up to 20 maternity units in England will have to shut to ensure mothers and babies receive safe care amid shortages of doctors and rising caesarean section rates, an NHS leader has warned.

Matthew Hopkins, the NHS Alliance’s director for acute care, said centralising childbirth services into fewer hospitals was “inevitable” and the “right thing”, but would lead to a political backlash against unpopular changes.

With care shortfalls biting across the country, the National-led coalition has been accused of letting chronic underfunding worsen

Back when she was healthy, Jane Harrison worked for the community – securing money for playgrounds, getting kids into sport and making sure her small town in New Zealand’s South Island was ready if an earthquake struck.

Now, she and her husband, Shaun Fitzgerald, 65, are both on disability assistance. Last year, when Fitzgerald – a roofer – was waiting for back surgery for spinal stenosis, Harrison left her job to help look after him at home. The operation in August 2025 was not as effective as hoped. He has since been back into the emergency department in intense pain, waiting for hours with severe cramping, she says. “We called the paramedics recently and they said: ‘There’s no beds in hospital, if we take you you’ll have to sit and you clearly can’t, you’re better off at home.’”

Antibody patterns in the blood may help doctors identify people at risk so they can be treated earlier, research shows

Patterns of antibodies in people’s blood could predict the onset of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) a decade before diagnosis, according to research that raises hopes for catching the condition early.

Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the two main forms of IBD, are typically treated only after symptoms appear, when the gut has already been damaged. But scientists found that the immune system sends warning signals up to a decade before diagnosis, paving the way for potentially earlier detection and even prevention.

Exclusive: Former health secretary says upfront investment in support is needed ‘if we are going to end the Neet crisis’

Ministers should cut welfare spending to fund more employment support if it wants to end the youth Neet crisis, the author of a government-led review has said.

Alan Milburn, the Tony Blair-era health secretary, told the Guardian he believed ministers should reduce benefits payments to help pay for more employment support, opening a potentially contentious debate within the Labour party over welfare cuts.

In the three weeks since a health worker’s death in Siberia, officials have stonewalled the WHO – setting a worrying precedent for future pandemics

Is there a plague outbreak in Russia? If the answer were a clear yes, there shouldn’t be much reason to worry. With swift medical intervention, plague is treatable. But in the nearly three weeks since a worker at a Siberian plague research unit died of a mysterious respiratory illness, state officials have been consistently tight-lipped about what happened and whether there were any further cases.

It is this uncertainty that has the World Health Organization (WHO) and international community worried: partly because there is a – very small – risk of an outbreak, and partly because it is yet another warning that the international coordination we rely on to prevent pandemics is fraying along with the rest of international politics, and could easily fail to protect us in the future.

Dr Denise Al Mari-de Waal and Aaron Hume call for lifelong support and an integrated care pathway that recognises the physical and mental health impacts of cerebral palsy

The sudden passing of RJ Mitte has deeply affected many people in the cerebral palsy community (RJ Mitte, actor best known for Breaking Bad, dies aged 34, 12 October). His success challenged assumptions and showed what can be achieved when people are given opportunities and support.

Yet the 165,000 people with cerebral palsy in the UK are too often underestimated. Others frequently decide what we can and cannot do without recognising our abilities, ambitions or potential.

Eugene Litvak says hospitals could rearrange scheduled admissions as part of efforts to prepare operationally for changes on 1 January

Your report (Millions of Medicaid recipients to face draconian requirements as of 1 January, 13 October) warns that millions may lose Medicaid coverage just as hospitals face rising uncompensated care and growing emergency department demand.

Protecting eligible patients from losing coverage through paperwork must remain the first priority. But hospitals also have a responsibility to prepare operationally for 1 January. They should not compound the coming increase in emergency demand with avoidable peaks they create themselves.

Linbury theatre, London
Six fearless singers and the Chroma Ensemble, conducted with arresting immediacy by Naomi Woo, rise to the challenge of the brutal musical onslaughts and anarchic orchestrations of Philip Venables’ raw, imaginative score

Sarah Kane revolutionised British theatre with five provocative plays written between 1995 and 1999. Her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, was her most personal, confronting the clinical depression she struggled with for years. The play was first performed posthumously in 2000, after she died by suicide in 1999.

The Royal Opera and Guildhall School of Music and Drama commissioned Philip Venables to adapt the play as an opera, which debuted in 2016. The composer, also known for a certain “in-yer-face” approach, set Kane’s original text almost entirely, realising its 24 disjointed sections in a raw, imaginative score teeming with minimalist licks, prickly synth-pop and consoling nods to the baroque. The libretto shifts between poetic abstraction and scathing exchanges between a patient and a psychologist. An ensemble of six female singers navigates themes of depression, isolation and the agonising choices surrounding medication.

Exclusive: rules on same-sex wards could lead to delays in care, discrimination and animosity between groups, finds internal assessment

Trans people could face delays and a greater risk of “corridor care” under new NHS England guidance that means they will no longer be able to use same-sex wards, according to an internal report.

An NHS England impact assessment, seen by the Guardian, stated that trans people may also potentially experience discrimination and this could lead to them “avoiding accessing healthcare at all”.

Barbara O’Neill, identified as a risk to public safety in Australia, dismisses antibiotics, vaccines and scientifically proven cancer treatment at UK conference

A roar of laughter erupts from a crowd inside a large conference room at the De Vere Cranage Estate hotel. The joke? The idea that visiting the doctor could help treat a serious illness.

On stage the controversial Australian proponent of natural remedies Barbara O’Neill is taking part in a question-and-answer session during a five-day wellness conference, where science mixes uncomfortably with Bible verse and potentially deadly pseudo-scientific practices.

Health secretary says government has been preparing early and will spend money on ambulances and A&E upgrades

The NHS faces a more challenging winter than normal, the health secretary has warned, as she announced a £140m increase for urgent care in England.

Yvette Cooper said the money would help increase capacity, and that the NHS has been preparing since July to deal with the impact of seasonal illnesses.

Healthcare professionals retrieved files belonging to 19-year old students and a caretaker killed in Nottingham attack

A total of 15 NHS staff have now been sacked after accessing medical records belonging to the victims of a 2023 Nottingham attack, a trust said.

Valdo Calocane killed two 19-year-old students, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and Ian Coates, a 65-year-old caretaker, and attempted to kill three other people in the city in June 2023.

Exclusive: health bodies across country say controversial US firm’s data platform no better than systems already in use

NHS organisations that care for millions of people in England are rejecting Palantir’s patient data technology, according to freedom of information responses that reveal health bosses believe they can find better or equal alternatives in many cases.

Some health bodies said the £330m federated data platform (FDP) operated by the controversial US company had made it easier to manage waiting lists and has improved surgery scheduling. But, from Gateshead to Truro, others said they were declining to use it or had carried out trials and reverted to old systems. A Suffolk trust said other systems “supercede” the FDP’s functionality, while Greater Manchester’s care board called the Palantir system “duplicative” and “retrograde”.

I fear for what comes next because medics must be able to ask questions, raise concerns and admit mistakes. A defensive staff is dangerous for everyone

• Mark McDonald is a barrister representing Lucy Letby

I have been Lucy Letby’s barrister for the past two years. I have spent thousands of hours going through the evidence, speaking to experts and examining what happened to the babies who died or became seriously unwell on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital. I have worked with nearly 30 experts, including internationally recognised specialists in neonatology, pathology, insulin, statistics and other fields. It may be to some an inconvenient truth, but I am convinced that Letby is innocent, and her convictions represent one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in modern British legal history. That means she was failed by the police, the NHS, the criminal justice system and, importantly, a plethora of experts who simply got it wrong.

My work on the case has also raised wider concerns about the evidence and conclusions surrounding the deaths on the neonatal unit, and what the lessons being drawn from this case will mean for doctors and nurses in neonatal medicine.

Mark McDonald is a criminal defence and human rights barrister specialising in miscarriages of justice

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.

It will soon be time, once again, for our clocks to “fall back.” Nov. 1 is the date most places in the U.S. quit daylight saving time for 2026 and go back to standard time. We're still on this clock-changing treadmill, despite legislation that was supposed to eliminate it a few years ago, and despite medical professionals warning that these clock changes are bad for our health.

For example, a study out of the Stanford School of Medicine found that switching the time back and forth every year probably contributes to increased rates of stroke and obesity. Permanent daylight saving time would be an improvement on that, and permanent standard time would be even better, health-wise. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine published a position paper a few years ago stating that scientific evidence supports the idea "that the United States should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of permanent standard time, which aligns best with human circadian biology."

But despite all this, we’ll still have to turn the clocks ahead again in spring. So whatever happened to those bills in Congress aiming to abolish the time changes?

The most recent attempt to eliminate clock changes failed

The Sunshine Protection Act was a federal bill that would have made Daylight Saving Time permanent. If enacted, it would have taken effect on Nov. 5, 2023, the date that we would otherwise have changed the clocks. The result would be that our winter mornings would stay dark an hour longer than they currently do, but we’d get an hour more of daylight in the winter evenings.

The bill passed the Senate in March of 2022, but it wasn't taken up by the House of Representatives. In July of 2026, a similar law passed the House of Representatives, and President Trump wrote on Truth Social this month that "Republicans in the Senate have to get moving on what I call the 'No More Changing of Clocks Act.'" The Senate Majority Leader said it doesn't have the support to pass, since it would mean dark mornings for commuters and for children waiting for morning buses.

Which time would we stay with if we stopped changing the clocks?

We operate on two different times throughout the year: "standard time" and "daylight saving time." These even get their own time zones! For example, if a time is marked as "EST," that means eastern standard time, which is different from eastern daylight time.

Standard time is the one we use in winter, and daylight saving time is the one we use in summer. The bill mentioned above would have done away with standard time and kept us on daylight saving time year-round. Meanwhile, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has taken the position that we should stay on standard time (that is, winter time) year-round, since screwing with our circadian rhythms twice a year has detrimental effects on our health and safety. If they got their way, we would fall back some year and then never spring forward again.

What about state laws?

States have their own ideas about what time it should be. Currently, states are not allowed to switch to permanent daylight saving time, but they are allowed to stay on standard time year-round if they prefer. Two states do so: Hawaii and Arizona (minus the parts of Arizona in the Navajo nation).

Nineteen states have passed laws or resolutions that would allow them to switch to permanent daylight saving time if the federal government ever allows them to do so. Those states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, are Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Three other states have made attempts to join the list: Similar bills made it partway through the Kentucky and Ohio legislatures but were not signed into law. California voters have authorized a law that isn’t yet officially on the books.

Until a federal law passes, those states are stuck with their current time zones. Current federal law, as passed in 1966, allows states to opt out of daylight saving time (as Hawaii and Arizona have) but does not offer a way for states to make daylight saving time permanent or to choose their own dates for changing the clocks. If you’re sick of time changes, you can always move to one of the territories that don’t observe daylight saving, which include the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Food and Drug Administration is moving forward with plans to ease access to unproven peptide drugs that are popular among members of Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again movement—despite FDA staff scientists finding that the drugs have not been sufficiently studied to establish safety and efficacy and may cause harms.

The FDA submitted an "Interim Access Policy" on peptides for review by the White House, according to a filing notice posted on an Office of Management and Budget website. The posting does not provide information on the proposed policy. But people familiar with the proposal told The Associated Press that it would give the FDA "enforcement discretion" on certain peptide drugs. This would allow the agency to choose not to enforce current restrictions on peptides and provide an assurance to specialty pharmacies eager to start making them that they will not be targeted by the agency.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, did not respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

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Millions affected by smoke from wildfires as schools close, respiratory illnesses soar and diplomatic tensions rise

Singapore is threatening to prosecute companies responsible for some of the worst fires in years in neighbouring Indonesia, as the region grows increasingly frustrated with a persistent, acrid haze that could result in diplomatic relations fraying.

Lawrence Wong, the Singaporean prime minister, said his government was distributing masks to vulnerable citizens and working with countries in the region to deal with the smoke. “At the same time, we are looking into which companies may be responsible for the fires,” he said in a Facebook post on Thursday, adding that he was exploring the idea of “joint action with other countries”.

More than 5 million people around the world have an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) called geographic atrophy, in which cells in the retinas die off. And until now, no treatment could restore their vision. The PRIMA system, which was approved in Europe in July and is awaiting FDA clearance in the US, changes that. It combines a retinal implant with camera-­equipped eyeglasses to improve sight in patients who develop a blind spot in the middle of their vision due to advanced AMD. After training sessions, more than 80% of recipients were able to read, do crosswords, and use their phones.

BROWN BIRD DESIGN

Developed by the California-based Science Corporation, the system takes advantage of the fact that AMD doesn’t damage all retinal circuitry; only photoreceptors—the cells that convert light into an electrical signal—die off. PRIMA’s implant mimics those cells and transmits visual information directly to healthy eye circuitry and on to the brain. “We’re leveraging all of the body’s own natural functions to process and transmit the information,” says Frank Brodie, an ophthalmologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and Science Corp.’s chief medical officer for ophthalmology. 

BROWN BIRD DESIGN

BROWN BIRD DESIGN

Update: This story has been updated to clarify the specific cases of AMD the PRIMA system treats.

Linda Marsa is a former Los Angeles Times reporter and an author who covers medicine, health, science, and the environment. 

I don’t remember much about Peppy, my first and only pet cat. I can conjure the sensation of stroking her while she purred, recall how she used to get stuck in trees (just like in cartoons!), and chuckle about the time she pooed in my baby sister’s cot. That’s about it.

What I do vividly remember, though, is the day she went missing. I was 10 years old, and I searched everywhere for her, scouting nearby fields and woods until sunset. I made posters. We never found her. I was devastated.

There was no way to get more time with Peppy, but almost 30 years later, pet owners are being offered an ever-expanding set of options to potentially prolong their years with their furry companions. The possibilities include drugs, cloning, and even cryonics. But is that a good thing?

There’s certainly a market for pet preservation. And a growing number of biotech companies have their sights set on pet longevity. Loyal, a company that is currently working on three potential longevity drugs for dogs, is trialing one designed to improve metabolic health in around 1,300 pet dogs across the US. Others are testing dog drugs that aim to combat both age-related diseases, including conditions like obesity and osteoarthritis, and aging itself. There’s even a company focused on longevity medicines for domesticated cats.

I don’t know how or when Peppy died. But if there had been a drug that might have protected her from diabetes or arthritis, there’s no doubt I would have tried to get my hands on it.

That’s about where my enthusiasm for pet life extension ends, though.

I’m far less interested in cloning, a relatively new option for people mourning a pet and seeking a replacement. In most cases, this technology involves taking the DNA of a pet, putting it into an egg cell from another animal of the same species, and growing the resulting embryo in a surrogate animal. It worked for Dolly the sheep, who was born the year before Peppy went missing. It has since worked for other mammals, including cattle, horses, and ferrets—and cats and dogs. In the US, a company called Viagen Pets offers to clone cats and dogs for $50,000 a go. This doesn’t result in an exact replica of the animal but a genetic twin.

Still, there are lots of reasons why a person might want to clone a pet. On its website, Viagen explicitly offers customers “a way to hold on.” Lori Kogan, a professor of clinical sciences at Colorado State University who has studied human-animal relationships for decades, doesn’t have a problem with the practice. She points out that while we have well-established rituals for coping with the loss of a person—such as funeral services, time off work, and memorial gifts—we don’t really have the same for pets. As a result, pet owners can experience what is sometimes called “disenfranchised grief,” she says. Having their feelings go unrecognized can feel isolating. If cloning a pet brings a person peace, she says, “who are we to judge?”

Fair enough. But I can’t help thinking that pet loss in childhood might be different. It’s often the first time a child confronts death. Losing Peppy was a formative experience, and distressing though it was, I like to think it helped prepare me for losses I experienced in adulthood. I wouldn’t want my own children to think that death is not final, and that individuals can be replicated or replaced.

Or, for that matter, revived, which is the promise behind pet cryonics. For a fee, a handful of companies offer to cool dead pets to extremely low temperatures and store them for long periods of time—even indefinitely. The idea is that at some point in the future, we’ll have invented incredible technologies that will not only bring your pet back to life but also cure whatever it died of. Alcor, a cryonics facility in Arizona, is currently storing the remains of hundreds of pets as well as people. It even recently announced it had cooled a small marsupial—its first pet sugar glider.

With cryonics, the chances of being reunited with your pet are bordering on zero. Even those who work in the field acknowledge that the stored people and animals are unlikely to be reanimated. As things stand, there is no way to really and truly bring any animal “back.”

I miss Peppy. But given the chance, would I stick her in a vat of liquid nitrogen? Or get another cat to give birth to a genetically identical animal? No, I would not.

RIP to the one and only Peppy.

US research says nitrogen dioxide in restaurants that cook with gas can exceed WHO limits, which also affects diners

Each time we enjoy a meal out or order a takeaway, someone cooks for us in a commercial kitchen. In the UK, 3.6 million people work in catering and hospitality. In the US it is estimated at close to 16 million. A first-of-its-kind study in the US has found catering staff can experience high air pollution at work – and that this can affect diners too.

Dr Drew Michanowicz, senior author of the study at non-profit research institute PSE Healthy Energy, said: “I was motivated by what we have learned over the years about what just 30 minutes of gas cooking can do to air quality in homes with the realisation that millions of people cook for a living for hours on end.”

Pontiff is recovering from a lobectomy, which is standard treatment for lung cancer caught early and can be curative

On Tuesday, surgeons in Rome removed the lower part of Pope Leo’s right lung, after a routine health check found a small growth that tests have since confirmed as lung cancer. The operation, called a lobectomy, is the standard treatment for lung cancer caught early, and for many patients it is the only treatment they will ever need. So what exactly did his doctors do, and what happens next?

Up to a quarter of active-duty Army members could receive a low testosterone result from mandatory military screening, despite the true prevalence of the condition likely being a tiny fraction of that figure, according to a study published Thursday in JAMA.

The finding adds to concerns that the mandatory screening announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in July will lead to a cascade of unnecessary medical evaluations for military members. Those evaluations could result in inappropriate testing, inaccurate results and diagnoses, and overtreatment that could cause harm, including infertility. Medical experts, including the Endocrine Society and the American Urological Association (AUA), have recommended against blanket screenings for these reasons. Still, the Pentagon has moved forward with the plans, releasing clinical guidance in September.

The JAMA study highlights the reasons why testosterone levels are not measured in men without symptoms—and also offers a glimpse of how many Army members could become ensnared in the clinically dubious screenings.

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Experts say seeking alternatives that deliver the same dose of oestrogen by the same method is key

Women in the UK are again facing shortages of some HRT products, with warnings they could persist for weeks. We take a look at the situation.

Experts are warning that the UK is unprepared for crises. A refrigerator cyber-attack scare in France is the latest reminder of the risks

What’s worrying French supermarket bosses should be prompting British ministers to action. On Sunday, hackers forced up the temperatures of refrigerators in hundreds of food stores across France to as high as 50C, resulting in waste and fires. Beyond the immediate destruction and inconvenience, it raised the prospect of other malicious actors finding new ways to play havoc with the food chain.

Only weeks before, 150 experts together warned the British government that it does not have a plan to feed people in a crisis ­– and that the west is entering an era in which not only disruption but the weaponisation of food is a real possibility. “The public has been led to assume that food will simply be there,” they wrote. “It may not be.”

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Rules mean single-sex wards, toilets and changing rooms will now be used by people based on their biological sex

Trans women will no longer be placed on female-only wards under new NHS England guidance on single-sex spaces.

The new rules, published on Thursday, mean single-sex wards, toilets and changing rooms will be used by people based on their biological sex, not their gender identity.

Rebecca Hope Duncan says she has not received any help after being assessed as autistic, in response to Prof Peter Fonagy’s review of mental health, ADHD and autism services. Plus letters from Jeremy Seymour, John Bryant, Peter Deadman, Steve Bamford and another reader

Your coverage of the Fonagy review concentrates on children and on the risk of diagnosing too readily (NHS at risk of ‘system failures’ as demand for ADHD and autism care soars, inquiry finds, 9 October). I’d like to speak for those of us who were not diagnosed at all.

I first asked for help at 17. For 34 years I was treated for anxiety, depression and trauma. All were real; none were the whole story. I was diagnosed as autistic at 51. The same report identified ADHD, which until 2013 could not officially be diagnosed alongside autism.

Exclusive: Four MPs raise conflict of interest concerns over Samantha Jones’s past links to a big provider of ADHD assessments

A senior civil servant should play no part in ministers’ crackdown on private attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism clinics because of her recent ties to the industry, MPs have said.

Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs are demanding that Samantha Jones, the permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), steps away from any role in plans to toughen regulation of the booming market in private neurodiversity assessments.

Family express concerns about William Chapman’s contact with mental health services before his death

A man who was killed by a tiger at a South Yorkshire zoo had bouts of psychosis, his family told an inquest opening, as they expressed concerns about his contact with mental health services before his death.

William Chapman was mauled to death by the animal at Yorkshire Wildlife Park in Doncaster on Saturday, after climbing into its enclosure.

Families in Vaca Muerta, the centre of Patagonia’s shale operation, report cancers, miscarriages and pollution

In Allen, a small town in Argentine Patagonia, many people living on the same street ended up falling ill. For some, it was severe migraines, nausea or skin irritation. For others, cancers, congenital abnormalities, miscarriages or stillbirth seemed to affect foetuses or children. People say it all started 13 years ago – when a well was drilled near their homes to extract gas and oil.

Calle Ciega 10 [Dead-end Street 10] lies on the eastern edge of Vaca Muerta, a vital area for Argentina’s economy, home to the world’s second-largest reserve of shale gas and fourth-largest reserve of shale oil. The region has more than 2,600 active wells, including one on this small street where about 20 families live, most of them seasonal workers on fruit farms.

Have you ever thought about what makes you you? Science assures us it has everything to do with the three-pound organ between our ears, with its billions of neurons and trillions of delicate connections. But it’s a lot trickier to explain why we have a sense of self-awareness or to pin down precisely where that first memory of Mommy actually resides. As we age, we forget most of what we’ve experienced, yet there’s still undeniable continuity: At 30, or 50, or 70, you will still be you.

To preserve that elusive continuity of self, some far-thinking technologists are working on ways to keep your brain going—even beyond death. Let’s call them the “mind savers.” They’re exploring everything from freezing brains in liquid nitrogen to augmenting living ones to uploading our memories to the cloud. Here, we look at six possible paths for keeping your mind going, how feasible they’d be, and what benefits the ­present-day research might bring—even if cognitive immortality doesn’t pan out.

EDDIE GUY

Head transplant

White’s experiments have been a source of grim fascination ever since. But to a few neuroscientists they’re inspiration, suggesting that one day a human head transplant—or, as some call it, a body transplant—could succeed. 

The idea’s main proponent is Sergio Canavero, a controversial Italian surgeon who, 10 years ago, even claimed he’d found a volunteer in Valery Spiridinov, a computer programmer suffering from a degenerative muscle disease. Spiridinov initially agreed to have his head transferred to the body of a brain-dead donor in China, but he later bowed out of the plan and instead got married. And that might be just as well. Critics say the procedure would be more like murder than medicine. Or, best-case scenario: Volunteers would be left paralyzed and in need of a ventilator for life. 

Canavero says that’s not necessarily true. He claims people’s views on the operation will change once they accept that reconnecting severed spinal cords is already possible. He pointed MIT Technology Review to a research article from this past summer that he coauthored with surgeons at Moscow’s Sklifosovsky Research and Clinical Institute for Emergency Medicine. The team cut through the spinal cords of three pigs at a point midway along their backs and then tested whether the severed nerve bodies could be fused back together using a surgical sealant. According to that paper, which appeared in the journal PLOS One, all the pigs regained the ability to stand and even walk unsteadily.

Does that mean a head could be attached to a new body and then actually control it? Mainstream researchers aren’t convinced. Grégoire Courtine, a spinal rehabilitation specialist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, says he’s been following Canavero’s claims “with little respect” and thinks that we should “pay zero attention.”

“There is no technology … capable of such a crazy idea,” Courtine wrote in an email.

Mindclones

Just 12 years after the book came out, artificial-intelligence technology has already brought some of her predictions to “life,” so to speak. Services such as StoryFile, Afterlife AI, and Synthesia allow users to upload their personal information and likeness in order to produce either conversational bots that share their memories or video talking heads that sound (and look) exactly like them. Influencers now let their “AI clones” do their work on TikTok, and some people are even building avatars of their aging parents in order to preserve their personalities.

While this mimicry can produce comical results, unhealthy attachments, or uncanny vibes, the increasing realism of generative AI invites people to emotionally accept the avatars as real beings. That was the case when Rothblatt appeared as a digital avatar during a 2025 event held by the UCLA Department of Communication called “The Bridge to Humanizing AI.”

Her copy, named Marvatar, was projected on a screen, led the discussions, and talked with the meatspace Rothblatt as an equal, at one point saying, “The dance isn’t about who leads, but how we move together.” According to the university, attendees were “visibly moved” and wept “with wonder” at Rothblatt’s vision of digital equality.

What’s still missing from Rothblatt’s mindclone prediction is evidence that these avatars have—or ever will have—any kind of true self-awareness. (We asked ChatGPT if it’s conscious, and it answered, “Probably not.”) But all that remains a gray zone. Neuroscientists don’t have a clear definition of consciousness, much less a diagnostic test they could apply to an avatar. 

Instead, what if the final determination is in the eye of the beholder? Your digital clone might not be you. But at some point it might be good enough for me. 

Brain in a jar

So, campy sci-fi film lovers that we are, it got our attention last year when a company called Bexorg started showing journalists actual human brains in vats, which it has been acquiring from organ donors soon after death and then “rebooting” by infusing them with oxygen-rich artificial blood.

The company claims these “physiologically intact human brains” will be more useful than animals for drug testing and safer than trying experiments on living volunteers. Add an Alzheimer’s compound to one of these disembodied brains and researchers can then measure exactly what the drug does inside the organ.

Bexorg’s CEO, Zvonimir Vrselja, is “sure” that some people would like to restore consciousness to out-of-body brains, but he’s tried to douse such speculation. While they are metabolically active, the company says, the brains have lost all coordinated electrical activity. That means they aren’t conscious—although, just to make sure, the neuroscientists running the experiments add the strong anesthetic propofol to the tissues. 

What’s more, right now a brain can be kept “alive” outside the body for only about 24 hours. That wouldn’t be much of a second life. Still, efforts are underway to improve the life-support systems. Bexorg says it hopes to eventually keep its brains going for two weeks.

EDDIE GUY

Gradual brain replacement

On paper, the goal is to manufacture tissue to graft into the brains of stroke victims, reversing damage and restoring function. Less officially, the project’s existence is a surprise coup for an extreme plan to defeat aging advanced by Jean Hébert, the neuroscientist leading the program, who argued in his 2020 book, Replacing Aging, that we can live longer by replacing our aging brain cells with young ones.

We don’t want to lose our identities. That’s why—according to Hébert—it would have to happen gradually, in small chunks, so our brains would have time to adapt to the new tissue.

Scientists who applied for the program say Hébert insisted on a very specific technological approach. While most researchers engineer individual cell types, ARPA-H asked for complex chunks of young, functional cortex—more or less like what you’d find in a developing fetus. “He wanted to create essentially an embryonic form of cortex that he thought you could somehow graft into an adult brain,” says Marius Wernig, a Stanford University stem-cell researcher who applied.

Skeptics say it’s unknown whether replacement brain chunks will ever properly function as part of your brain—say, by taking over memories. What’s more, it’s still unclear how to manufacture youthful cortex, or what ARPA-H calls “neocortical precursor tissue,” in the lab. One idea is to employ the latest advances in brain organoids. Imagine, if you will, a human cortex grown in a lab dish without a body. 

We know that the agency has an aggressive timeline: Over the course of five years, it wants researchers to lay the foundation for the first human tests of replacement cortex. The aim, it says, is to “take the ‘permanent’ out of brain damage.” And maybe out of old age, too. 

Brain upload

Scientists are already mapping this wiring in simpler animals. Two years ago, Seung took part in analyzing a fly brain that had been cut into paper-thin sheets and imaged with an electron microscope. Then he and his colleagues used image-analysis software to trace 139,255 neurons and about 55 million synapses. The fly map could lead to energy-efficient software that computes the way real brains do, Seung says. 

 Others believe the ultimate outcome of “connectomics” research  will be what’s called “whole-brain emulation,” or sometimes just “uploading.” It’s the idea, popular in some quarters of Silicon Valley, that a simulation created from a sliced-up brain could become so detailed that it would reproduce not only a generic intelligence but a particular one, like yours—complete with memories and opinions, and able to live again in a data server somewhere. 

Setting aside the question of whether a simulation would really be you, everyone agrees that this technology isn’t coming in time for those of us alive today. A survey of 312 neuroscientists, published in 2025 in PLOS One, estimated that human whole-brain emulation wouldn’t happen before 2125.

That long and unpredictable tech horizon helps explain why two US companies, Nectome and Sparks Brain Preservation, are offering to preserve human brains (or bodies) today by infusing them with the same potent chemicals used to “fix” the brains of fruit flies for connectome mapping. The idea: If the fine details of a brain’s structure can be preserved, one day in the far future it might be reanimated. 

But there’s a startling twist. Because brain tissue needs to be preserved quickly after a person’s death, both companies say they want to work with people taking advantage of medical aid in dying, now legal in 13 states and Washington, DC. In that procedure, doctors supply a lethal dose of drugs, but it’s the patient—someone with a terminal prognosis—who pushes the plunger. For a fee, the companies say, they can have a preservation team at the ready. So far, the service is not popular. The companies each say they are still awaiting their first aid-in-dying customer. 

EDDIE GUY

Synthetic neocortex

That’s right: an extra brain.

Recently, we’ve seen inklings of how this might come to pass. In 2024, Science Corporation, in California, unveiled a “biohybrid” brain-computer interface featuring nerve cells grown on a digital chip. Placed on an animal’s brain, these cells sent out long, thin axons that integrated with the animal’s own neurons. The result: two-way communication from computer to brain, in the brain’s language.

The technology could permit new types of medicine, like an implant that directs brain cells to produce dopamine and thereby treat Parkinson’s. But Max Hodak, the company’s CEO, says it also might count as a new brain part, which he likens to a “big, externalized cranial nerve.” 

Such a device could serve as the connector to Kurzweil’s computerized neocortex in the cloud, giving a living person unlimited extra processing power. Still other entrepreneurs believe if you kept adding biohybrid components to a brain, eventually you could morph it into an immortal machine. 

Daniel Burger, founder of the venture-­funded stealth startup Eightsix Science (its name refers to the 86 billion neurons in a human brain), says this dream could require mixing several of the brain-saving techniques on this list. He thinks we might need brains in vats, affording neuro-­engineers easy access, so they can gradually replace brain parts with biohybrid neural grafts. 

The ultimate goal is to migrate your mind into your extra, engineered brain, without ever breaking the continuity of self. “It’s not the typical ‘scan, store, simulate,’” says Burger. “I don’t think simulations will be conscious.” He adds, “We’re saying it’s going to be way more complicated, and it’s probably going to look like gradual brain replacement into a hardware brain.”

Once your mind is hardware, you won’t need a biological body. Instead, you could take up residence in a data center somewhere and perhaps even have backups distributed around the globe. “From that point on,” Burger acknowledges, “stuff becomes really crazy.”

Pig kidneys that were cooled to -150 °C and stored in a freezer for months have been successfully rewarmed and shown to work again for the first time, say scientists. They hope to replicate the findings with human organs.

The kidneys—which are similar in size to human ones—were left in a glass-like state, in one case for over a year. Once they had been rewarmed, tested in machines, and transplanted into pigs, the kidneys regained their color and made urine—key signs they were working.

“Ten years ago … I wouldn’t say I had high hopes it was actually going to work,” says Erik Finger, a transplant surgeon at the University of Minnesota who co-led the work. “After we did the last transplant, I walked out of the room and said, ‘This is a big deal.’” The research was shared at the preprint server bioRxiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The kidneys aren’t perfect, and the researchers have yet to demonstrate that they can sustain life over the long term. But the results represent a milestone achievement, say others in the field.

“Thank God that someone’s actually managed to do it in one organ and prove that it works,” says Peter Kilbride, a cryobiologist and cofounder of Kyros Kairos, a company focused on improving funding for cryopreservation research, who was not involved in the research. “For years, people have been trying and failing to get to this step. Finally, we’ve got this breakthrough.”

“Their work is amazing and will enable us to truly, indefinitely bank organs,” says Korkut Uygun, a biomedical engineer and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, who was also not involved in the research. “It is a revolutionary time for transplantation.”

Buying time

Every year, tens of thousands of organ transplants take place in the US alone. These procedures are thought to have saved 2 million years of life in the last 25 years. But there’s plenty of room for improvement.

One major challenge is the lack of available organs. Even when an organ becomes available, it can be difficult to get it to the right recipient within 24 to 36 hours, which is the current limit for preserving human organs.

People who receive organ transplants must also take drugs that suppress their immune systems for the rest of their lives. These drugs are meant to stop their bodies from rejecting the new organs. But they come with side effects and increase the risk of infections and cancer.

The ability to bank organs for long periods of time holds the promise to address all these challenges. Doctors would have more time to match organs to recipients. They’d be able to limit the risk of organ rejection, too—potentially by preparing recipients, and their immune systems, beforehand.

“With real organ banking … instead of the patients waiting for the organ, it’s the organs that are waiting for the patients,” says Finger.

Scientists have been able to cool cells to ultra-low temperatures through a process called vitrification, which essentially turns them to something like glass. This procedure is already used to store eggs, sperm, and embryos. Vitrifying whole organs is much harder.

Some problems can be avoided with cryoprotectants—chemicals that work like antifreeze and prevent damaging ice crystals from forming. But these chemicals tend to be incredibly toxic. It’s also difficult to rapidly and uniformly cool large tissues, and just as hard to evenly rewarm an organ all the way through.

Working with John Bischof, a bioengineer at the University of Minnesota, Finger and colleagues have come up with a solution. Once an organ has been loaded with a cryoprotectant, they infuse it with iron oxide nanoparticles. These nanoparticles don’t do anything to the cells. But when it’s time to rewarm the organ, they can be activated with an electromagnetic field. 

When the radiofrequency of that field switches between two states, the particles also flip, realigning themselves with the field. That causes them to release heat throughout the organ. Adjusting the power of the field allows the team to control the rate of heating so that it gets faster once the organ reaches -120°C. 

The researchers successfully vitrified rat kidneys using this approach in work published in 2023. Back then, they were able to rewarm kidneys that had been kept in a freezer for up to 100 days before transplanting them into rats.

Since then, the team has been trying to achieve the same success with bigger organs. Pig kidneys are thought to be a good model for human ones—they’re about the same size and look similar. Rat kidneys weigh around one gram; pig kidneys are around 100.

It hasn’t been easy. The cryoprotectant used for vitrifying rat kidneys didn’t work as well in the pig organs. “We had to rediscover and modify the cocktail,” says Bischof. “That’s why it’s taken us three years.”

Deep-freezing kidneys

The first step in the procedure is to remove a kidney from a donor pig. Once it’s out, the kidney is flushed with a commonly used organ preservation solution to remove the blood, bagged, and temporarily laid on a bed of ice in a cooler so it can be taken over to the engineering lab.

There, team members unpack the kidney and hook it up to a device they’ve designed to control the organ’s temperature and pressure. Then they start to load it up with the cocktail of cryoprotectants, slowly enough to ensure an even spread through the organ but quickly enough to minimize any toxic effects. It takes around two hours.

The next step is to infuse the organ with the iron oxide nanoparticles, which are pumped through the organ for around seven to eight minutes, says Finger. Then it’s time to cool the organ by pumping cold nitrogen vapor into a chamber housing it.

It’s a delicate process, and the team must ensure that the organ is cooling all the way through. At the same time, they must lower the kidney’s temperature as quickly as possible to prevent ice from forming. “Oftentimes there are multiple people doing different things to make sure that things don’t go awry,” says Bischof.

Once the organ reaches the vitrified state at around -120 °C, it “behaves like a glass,” says Finger. “At that point, you can stay stable for long periods of time—we think indefinitely.” The team then pauses the cooling process to ensure that the organ is glassy throughout. Otherwise, it could crack.

After the pause, if everything goes well, the kidney is ultimately cooled to -150 °C. Once it’s in the freezer, it can stay there for days, weeks, or even months. The team has kept a small number of kidneys banked for over a year.

Pink right up

The real test of these kidneys comes when they’re taken out of the freezer, rewarmed, and flushed of their chemicals and nanoparticles. Can they support life? So far, the team has tested some of them in a couple of different ways.

In one set of experiments, the researchers put rewarmed kidneys on perfusion devices—systems that are already used in transplant surgeries both to provide organs with nutrients and to help doctors assess them while they’re out of the body.

In another set of experiments, Finger and his colleagues transplanted rewarmed kidneys into pigs and monitored them for two hours. In both experiments, the rewarmed kidneys seemed to recover, says Finger. “They pink right up,” he says. 

There are lots of ways to measure the function of a kidney, but one key test is whether or not the organ can make urine. By this measure, the rewarmed kidneys did well, although they produced around two-thirds of the amount that would normally be expected. “They produce urine … within a minute or so,” says Finger. “We know that they work.” 

Most of the rewarmed kidneys had been banked for days or weeks. But one had been in the freezer for just over a year. When Finger and his colleagues rewarmed it and put it on a perfusion machine, they found that it produced urine “immediately.” “It actually looked better than many of the [other] kidneys,” says Finger. “We’re comfortable now saying we can store them for a year and rewarm them with excellent function.”

“It’s a very big deal to go a year,” says Kevin Myer, president and CEO of LifeGift, an organ procurement organization based in Texas. Being able to store organs for that length of time would transform organ transplantation. He envisions banks of organs that could be used on demand in emergency cases where people can’t wait, such as for some drug overdoses or gunshot wounds.

Final hurdles

But the procedure isn’t ready for prime time just yet. As well as producing less urine than expected, the rewarmed kidneys also showed signs of injury. The damage seems to be caused by the cryoprotectant chemicals, say the researchers.

“This is one big breakthrough that solves half the problem,” as Kilbride puts it.

The team has shown that the rewarmed kidneys can regain blood flow, which is “very important,” says Greg Fahy, a cryobiologist who is considered a pioneer in the field. But he’s worried about the extent of the damage to the organs. “We can’t tell from these experiments whether these kidneys might have supported life or not.”

But Fahy, who is chief scientific officer at the biotech companies Intervene Immune and 21st Century Medicine (where he is also executive director), acknowledges that it’s not clear how these kidneys might fare once they’re inside a living animal for the long term. 

Finger also hopes to find ways to repair the damage seen in the kidneys. Other research has shown that the health of transplant organs can improve while they’re on perfusion machines. And damaged kidneys might undergo some level of self-repair once they’re in a body. At any rate, human kidneys may cope better with the process than pig kidneys, says Finger.

The next step will be to test the kidneys in pigs over longer periods of time. The team, along with many other researchers in the field, will continue the search for less toxic cryoprotectants, too. Finger, Bischof, and their colleagues are also planning experiments with human kidneys.

Finger is optimistic. “We’re going to see that there’s injury, and it’s not perfect … but now we’ve got to the point where it works,” he says. “These are big, historic milestones in our field, and we’re excited about it.”

Resolution Foundation says ‘crude changes’ to benefits system would probably make it harder for people to work

Banning people with anxiety, ADHD or autism from claiming disability benefits would not deliver major financial savings and would probably make it harder for them to get or stay in a job and participate in society, a leading thinktank has warned.

The Resolution Foundation said any proposals to make certain mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions ineligible for personal independence payments (Pip) would be “crude changes” aimed at hitting unrealistic savings targets.

Christopher Gardner, the author of Food Sense and director of nutrition studies at Stanford, says we have overcomplicated the question of what to eat

Finally, some good news: eating well is more straightforward than you think. “There’s a lot of good science out there, and it mostly agrees,” says Stanford University’s director of nutrition studies and professor of medicine Christopher Gardner from his office in Palo Alto – beaming, bronzed and the picture of health.

In the age of social media and wellness grift, we’ve overcomplicated the question of what to eat, he says.

Experts peel back the evidence to see whether any of the health claims about vitamin patches stick – or whether it’s the placebo effect at work

• Read more in the Antiviral series

Feeling fatigued and listless? Searching for an energy boost? Want to improve your mood and motivation? The solution may be, according to a proliferation of online articles and wellness TikToks, not to seek medical advice but to whack on a vitamin patch.

Wearers purport to feel more focused or energised when adorned with the patches, some of which look like transparent squares, and others which are cuter and more colourful, resembling stickers or temporary tattoos.

Relatives of William Chapman say footage of attack shared online ‘deeply offensive’ and causing them ‘severe distress’

The family of a man killed by a tiger at a wildlife park in the UK have spoken about their “severe distress” at the circulation of online media after Donald Trump reposted a video of the incident.

William Chapman, 23, was mauled to death after entering an enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park, near Doncaster, on Saturday.

Its call sign was Morphine 1-2.  

In February 2007, the hulking dual-­rotor casualty evacuation helicopter had just flown three wounded soldiers to a field hospital in Balad, north of Baghdad, when another call came: an emergency mission to fly through an insurgent-controlled area in broad daylight. Typically, helicopters would be in a spot like this only at night, and with all lights turned off. 

As it passed near the city of Karmah, in the eastern side of Al-Anbar province, an insurgent fired a portable missile launcher. The tail gunner, who likely saw the shot roaring in, yelled for the pilot to make an evasive move. But the missile had already locked on, and the ensuing blast started a fire on board. After the pilot battled the failing machine for 58 agonizing seconds, Morphine 1-2 plunged to the ground. All seven crew members were killed.  

Why was the helo there in daylight? “It was getting blood and bringing it back. It was [on] what we call a ‘blood run,’ and [it’s] the highest of priorities besides casualty evacuation,” explains Lieutenant Commander Robert Murray, a Navy officer and program manager at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, who studied this incident as an intelligence officer.

Today, a chronic shortage of blood in both the military and civilian worlds is fueling a race to develop synthetic alternatives. About 90% of preventable battlefield deaths are due to hemorrhage—bleeding that happens when a blood vessel ruptures—and it’s the leading cause of maternal deaths worldwide. A study published in Transfusion in 2025 found that of 1.2 million trauma patients in the United States who potentially needed blood before reaching a hospital, just 1% received it. The shortage results in about 10,000 preventable deaths each year in the US, according to the American College of Surgeons. Globally, that figure is likely in the millions. 

One reason for the shortfall is that blood has a storage problem. Whole blood lasts only 35 days when refrigerated, so banks separate out components to stretch the timeline. But that’s an imperfect solution. The platelets that help wounds clot are typically stored at room temperature and last for a week or less. Hospitals and the military freeze the red blood cells that carry oxygen, as well as the protein-rich plasma that restores volume and aids coagulation. Once thawed, though, both will spoil within days. “What happens if I don’t know when I’m going to be attacked? Well, thaw it and you let it expire, right?” Murray says. 

A JAMA study of combat injuries in Afghanistan suggests a magic number for someone who needs a transfusion: You have 36 minutes to get started.

That’s why Murray—who, in addition to his military experience, has a PhD in physiology—is leading a DARPA effort to address blood’s battlefield problems. He’s in charge of a new $73 million dollar program called RAPIID (for “resuscitation and prevention of ischemia-induced dysfunction”). Its goal is to create shelf-stable versions of the three major transfusion constituents: plasma, platelets, and red blood cells. As it gets underway late this year, RAPIID picks up on decades of work to synthesize blood or help it last longer. Most recently, that includes a prior $47.5 million DARPA project called FSHARP (for “fieldable solutions for hemorrhage with bio-artificial resuscitation products”), in which researchers have demonstrated promising results in animals. 

MATT ROTH

MATT ROTH

With RAPIID trials for the different components occurring in parallel, the goal is to have bags of dried blood products deployed in the field by 2029. That puts Murray in the position of a conductor coordinating an orchestra of clinical trials with the FDA, while also sourcing the paraphernalia that goes along with transfusions—everything from combat-durable storage bags to tests that could check how much artificial blood a patient already has. 

Getting it all done will be tough, but the military is feeling the pressure to address its shortage. Blood drives may not deliver in time after a mass-casualty event, and a JAMA study of combat injuries in Afghanistan suggests that if the injured person needs a transfusion, the magic number is 36 minutes. “If something is survivable—and generally we classify most all hemorrhage as survivable—[you’re] almost guaranteed to survive if you get the blood before that 36-minute mark,” Murray says. After that, the chance of survival “starts to drop precipitously.”  

In the mission to make portable, shelf-stable blood components, plasma is the low-hanging fruit. Researchers have known how to isolate and freeze-dry plasma, the yellowish liquid that makes up 55% of whole human blood, since the late 1930s. On the battlefields of World War II, its mix of water, salts, and thousands of types of proteins helped restore blood volume in wounded soldiers—and to some degree controlled bleeding. In the 1960s, the US abandoned freeze-dried plasma because it carried a risk of transmitting hepatitis to recipients from infected donors. But screening, testing, and drying techniques improved, and starting in 2010, the US military launched a yearslong effort to rebuild its capacity for producing these products. Over the past two years, the FDA has allowed two types of freeze-dried plasma to be used in emergencies by the US military—and one can even be used by civilians. 

As for platelets, efforts at extending their life date back to the 1950s, but they haven’t seen a ton of success. Bioengineers have, for example, attempted to attach the membranes of platelets to synthetic particles. The most successful project comes from a company called Cellphire, which freeze-dries actual human platelets. The product has shown safety and efficacy in humans in clinical trials, but its dependence on donors means it’s unclear whether this approach can scale.

Red blood cells have been similarly tough to preserve or mimic. Their most critical component is hemoglobin, which carries oxygen and comes encased in a cell membrane. For more than a century, researchers have been looking for ways to deliver hemoglobin without the immunological challenges created by this exterior, including the fact that donors’ and recipients’ blood types need to be compatible. Evolutionary pressure developed that wrapper for very good reason, though: “Naked” hemoglobin tends to break down quickly in the bloodstream, and that can cause organ damage. It also scavenges nitric oxide, our body’s natural mechanism for opening up blood vessels, and causes those channels to constrict.

This problem became all too clear in the 1980s and 1990s, when fears that transfusions could transmit HIV sparked interest in a class of membrane-free delivery mechanisms called hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs). One, named HemAssist, consisted of hemoglobin subunits linked together to avoid the rapid-breakdown problem. It had the added benefit of lasting roughly a year in cold storage (red blood cells last about 40 days)—but it didn’t solve the nitric oxide problem, so it constricted blood vessels. In a clinical trial, 24 of the 52 people who received HemAssist died, compared with eight out of 46 in the control group. The parent company terminated trials in 1998. A review of clinical studies published in JAMA in 2008 further solidified HBOCs’ fate, finding that they generally triple patients’ chances of heart attack and increase the risk of death by 30%.

More recently, researchers have tried to grow red blood cells in a lab using a technology called “blood pharming,” which involves making them from progenitors known as induced pluripotent stem cells. The stumbling blocks? Cost and yield. DARPA launched a pharming initiative in 2008, using stem cells from discarded umbilical-cord blood, but was unable to get the cost below tens of thousands of dollars per unit of red blood cells. They pulled the plug and offloaded the research to the Uniformed Services University. Even if the cost were lower, though, pharmed blood can’t be stored in a backpack. “These are still cells—they still require a refrigerator, they still require special handling,” Murray says. 

It won’t be easy to solve all these challenges at once. “Each one of those projects individually is a massive undertaking,” says John Holcomb, a surgery professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who was a combat surgeon in Mogadishu, Somalia, during the battle that inspired Black Hawk Down. “I think that they will probably be successful individually. How we use those individual products, or combine those products together, I think remains to be seen.”

Several years after DARPA gave up on lab-grown blood, Murray was stationed at a base on Okinawa, an island 400 miles southwest of the Japanese mainland, where he witnessed the vulnerability of the blood supply firsthand. The site houses a blood bank that serves the roughly 27,000 Marines commanded from the island—plus thousands more military personnel on the base and deployed within a 100-million-square-mile stretch of the Pacific called USPACOM, which ranges from western India to Hawaii and from Antarctica to the Arctic. “The blood center is right next to the hospital, which is about 200 meters from all of the satellite communications on that island,” Murray told me. A missile strike could take out all three.

Murray wondered: Is there a way to produce synthetic blood that could last longer? As he completed his PhD in physiology in 2018, the military was also awakening to the vulnerability of the Okinawa facility. The 2018 National Defense Strategy, which shifted military focus from terrorism to a potential ground war with China or Russia, showed war planners the risks of relying on a single site for blood runs covering all of USPACOM. DARPA then got serious once again about making fake blood and kicked off the FSHARP program in 2023. Murray came aboard as a deputy program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office in 2024 and was named a program manager in 2026, just a few months before RAPIID put out its call for proposals this past May. 

COURTESY OF SEN GUPTA

Before he took the helm, related work had been underway for years. Aided by FSHARP funding, researchers at a company called KaloCyte continued testing a technique—originally developed by doctors who are now at the University of Maryland, Penn State, and the University of Pittsburgh—that “upcycles” hemoglobin from expiring donor blood. “We take that hemoglobin and then we package it in a lipid nanoparticle that functions like an artificial cell membrane,” explains CEO Elaine Haynes. 

The product, called ErythroMer, is essentially a new kind of HBOC. The membrane prevents breakdown, limits dangerous scavenging of nitric oxide, and also helps the hemoglobin take up and release oxygen. Each ErythroMer cell includes a lipid called KC-1003, which acts like a sentry: In response to high pH in the lungs, it signals another small molecule within ErythroMer to move away, allowing oxygen in. Then, in tired tissue, where pH is lower, KC-1003 brings the small molecule back, releasing the oxygen.  

Using a well-understood process called lyophilization, similar to one that World War II–era scientists used with plasma, the team freeze-dries its product to store at room temperature, where it can remain stable for two years. In a 2016 study of mice and rats with up to 70% of their blood removed, ErythroMer stabilized blood pressure and oxygen delivery—without the devastating constriction of blood vessels that sank HemAssist. FSHARP furthered that work, helping fund studies on how the HBOC interacted with plasma and platelets.

Much like the handle of a Swiss Army knife, the synthetic platelet has specialized attachments—peptides that serve as the biological equivalents of a corkscrew or a nail file.

KaloCyte, though, still has plenty to figure out. Haynes says the company can source only about 1,000 to 2,000 units of expiring hemoglobin a month. So it has licensed a yeast strain that it aims to use to create its own hemoglobin in the lab.

To do that, DARPA has turned to Anirban Sen Gupta, a bioengineering professor at Case Western Reserve University. “Traditionally platelets were thought of [as] blood cement, but it’s not that simple,” he explains. “They are, in my opinion, like drones, surveilling the blood vessel wall continuously, looking for signs of injury.” Sen Gupta’s team, which also includes collaborators at the University of Pittsburgh, used FSHARP funding to continue work on a product called SynthoPlate. Fabricated from a lipid nanoparticle that he likens to the handle of a Swiss Army knife, it has specialized peptide attachments—the biological equivalents of a corkscrew or a nail file. The first version has three: One binds to a chemical called von Willebrand factor, which helps platelets stick to the walls of injured blood vessels; another attaches to collagen, which acts as a scaffold for regrowing cells; and the third mimics a blood protein called fibrinogen, which acts like a Lego connector that allows the synthetic platelets to stick to real ones near a wound. Like ErythroMer, the product is freeze-dried and can be reconstituted with sterile water. It keeps for over a year at room temperature and at least three months at a desertlike 122 °F.

In a 2026 paper in Advanced Science, the researchers showed that SynthoPlate cut bleeding time and blood loss by more than half in mice with low platelet counts. In a separate study, they also safely injected the faux platelets into rats’ bone marrow—a more useful delivery site, given that a bleeding patient might not have an available vein. Sen Gupta and a colleague have spun this work out into a company called Haima Therapeutics. 

The good news, as he sees it, is that the pharmaceutical industry excels at mass-­producing millions of billions of lipid nanoparticles—witness Operation Warp Speed, in which these blobs of fat held delicate snippets of mRNA in covid shots. “The magic of the artificial platelet is in all those peptides that are decorating the surface of the particle, but the scalability of the platform is very well established,” he says.

Around the world, prospective blood alternatives abound. Researchers at Cambridge University in the UK are trying to pharm red blood cells for people with rare blood types or blood disorders like sickle cell anemia, and other researchers have also cultured platelets and red blood cells. Japanese scientists are already testing their own version of encapsulated human hemoglobin in human subjects.

Over the course of the next three years, RAPIID will move DARPA’s efforts closer to real life. In addition to ErythroMer and SynthoPlate, the agency in early October announced funding for five other companies working on blood components. Among them is a firm called Abioremedi that eschews hemoglobin for synthetic versions of other oxygen-carrying proteins such as cytoglobin, neuroglobin, and myoglobin encased in albumin—the most abundant protein in human plasma. Octapharma USA won the sole contract to supply plasma to RAPIID and will also be competing in platelets with an FDA-approved pair of clotting proteins it affixes to a disc-shaped nanoparticle.

With those players in place, the agency will focus for the next year on getting technologies through large FDA-regulated animal studies. Murray has set up a bit of a Hunger Games scenario: Each contractee working on blood components has only one year of guaranteed funding. He says he’s taking advantage of advancements in the field since FSHARP launched but is also hedging against any manufacturing or regulatory setbacks ahead of his 2029 deadline. Getting cut doesn’t mean the product is bad, just that the time frame was too demanding. 

The second and third years will focus on human trials, overseen by the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. That will include using the products in situations where the risk of side effects is outweighed by the danger of doing nothing, such as with severely injured people in ambulances.

The possibility of fatal outcomes has invited second-guessing about DARPA’s choices. For Shibani Pati, who directs the Center for Research in Transfusion Medicine and Cell Therapies at the University of California, San Francisco, Murray could be making things too “DARPA hard” on himself by backing products like SynthoPlate and ErythroMer, which are previously untested in humans. “They need to make a very concerted effort to take what they’ve already developed and push it through to approval through the FDA,” she says. “Not start with moonshot projects that will take forever to get through.” For platelets, Pati thinks the RAPIID program would have done better to tap Cellphire, since its products have already received millions from the Pentagon and shown safety and efficacy in humans. (Murray notes that he can only select companies that apply, and Cellphire did not.)

She has similar qualms about ErythroMer. A different HBOC that sources hemoglobin from cattle, called Hemopure, has been approved for use since 2001 in South Africa, she notes. And though it hasn’t been approved by the FDA—it was part of the fateful 2008 JAMA study—US doctors are cleared to use it for patients who have bad immune responses or religious objections to conventional transfusions. 

Holcomb, the surgery professor, worries the effort will run into issues with interactions between the products. He notes that individual blood components have more than one role: Red blood cells also help with clotting, platelets also are anti-inflammatory, and plasma helps tune coagulation. There’s no guarantee that the versions RAPIID helps develop will work in the same ways.  

Murray says that FSHARP’s animal studies tested all the products together, using whole blood as a baseline, precisely because of such possible interactions. The cocktail met its program metrics in all but one area: The clotting was not quite as good, perhaps because negative charges in some molecules repel one another. 

“I do not think they will replicate all the functions that whole blood does in our body,” Holcomb says. But, he admits, “you may not need to, right? When you get seriously injured and you lose 50% of your intravascular volume, you’re dead, right? So if you lose 30% and maybe you’re hanging on to life just barely, maybe you show up with all these different products, and you have enough whole blood left in you to do these other functions.” 

Murray is determined to complete trials so that shelf-stable blood can be delivered in 2029. In addition to the storage bags, he’s already sourcing finger sticks for in-field blood testing and a battery-powered device to heat up the blood components.

The danger of blood runs—and, by extension, the vulnerability of millions in combat zones, maternity wards, and ambulances—drives his scientific daring. Knowing the stakes, he told his boss in 2024 that even if FSHARP failed, “we should invest 50 million more dollars in it and do it again.”

Andrew Rosenblum is a technology journalist and the author of the techno-thriller Stretch Goals.