The altar stone, which we now know is from Scotland, may have been a gift or marker of political alliance

Five thousand years after the first monument was created at Stonehenge, it continues to give up dramatic new secrets – such as the “jaw-dropping� revelation earlier this year that its central stone had been transported more than 700km to Salisbury plain from the very north of Scotland.

While it had been known for more than a century that the huge sarsens for which Stonehenge is best known come from more than 12 miles (20km) away and its “bluestones� originated in Wales, the discovery that the altar stone, which sits right at its heart, was Scottish caused an archaeological sensation, capturing headlines around the world.

Study finds 9,000-year-old remains in Americas hold genomes of bacteria family that causes disease

After the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494, an unknown and disfiguring disease erupted in the army camps and duly spread across Europe when the men returned to their homelands the following year.

The epidemic is regarded as the first historical account of syphilis, but where the disease came from has been debated by scholars ever since. One camp believes it emerged in the Americas, and was brought to Europe by Columbus in 1493. Another suspects it was lurking in Europe before the explorer set sail.

Paper published in International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents in 2020 withdrawn by Dutch publisher Elsevier

A controversial study that promoted hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, as a treatment for Covid-19 has officially been withdrawn.

On Tuesday, Elsevier, a Dutch academic publishing company which owns the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, issued the retraction of the March 2020 study, saying “concerns have been raised regarding this article, the substance of which relate to the articles’ adherence to Elsevier’s publishing ethics policies and the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants�.

Jaw found in Scotchtown, Orange county, is latest notable discovery from ice age-era animal in the region

A New York state resident has found a complete mastodon jaw just below the surface of their lawn, after spotting two large teeth protruding from the ground.

Mastodons roamed the US north-east during the Pleistocene epoch, and there have been several notable mastodon discoveries in the region, including a complete 13,000-year-old skeleton in Hyde Park, New York, in 2000.

Academics agree that by protecting robotic vehicles and landing sites we will help archaeologists of the future

Just as the outline of an iron-age hut or remains of a Roman sword cause excitement today, archaeologists of the future could be brushing Martian dust off metal and marvelling at one of Nasa’s rovers.

Researchers have said that such instruments, as well as other forms of human activity on Mars, including landing sites and debris, must be preserved as part of the archaeological record of space exploration.

UK not part of Iris2 project described as ‘a significant step towards Europe’s sovereignty and secure connectivity’

The EU has launched an ambitious €10bn (£8.3bn) space programme with a constellation of 290 satellites to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink, further widening the post-Brexit security gap with the UK.

The constellation is intended to ensure the bloc’s security for governments and armies amid increasing global concerns over cybersecurity.

AGI in South Carolina investigated by government after leaked files revealed traumatic injuries and animal deaths

The US Department of Agriculture is investigating allegations from an animal rights organisation concerning Alpha Genesis Incorporated (AGI), the animal experimentation facility and breeder, from which 43 monkeys escaped last month.

AGI is accused of “abuse and neglect�, and of violations of the Animal Welfare Act, as leaked documents show that between 2021 and 2023, multiple primates held at AGI centres endured preventable traumatic injuries and deaths.

Previously unseen artefacts show invading forces included communities of men, women, children, craftworkers and merchants

Dozens of sites linked to the Viking great army as it ravaged Anglo-Saxon England more than 1,000 years ago have been discovered. Leading experts from York University have traced the archaeological footprint of the Scandinavian invaders, identifying previously unknown sites and routes.

The study, conducted by Dawn M Hadley, professor of medieval archaeology, and fellow archaeology professor Julian D Richards, found that the significance of many of the ingots, gaming pieces and other artefacts unearthed by metal detectorists over the years had been overlooked until now. They also discovered about 50 new sites that they believe were visited by the Viking great army.

Ministers set out plans for outlawing neonicotinoids but considering application by farmers to use Cruiser SB

Bee-killing pesticides are to be banned by the UK government, as ministers set out plans to outlaw the use of neonicotinoids.

However, the highly toxic neonicotinoid Cruiser SB could be allowed for use next year, as ministers are considering applications from the National Farmers’ Union and British Sugar.

Scientists surprised to find so many animals unknown to science in Alto Mayo, a well-populated region

Researchers in the Alto Mayo region of north-west Peru have discovered 27 species that are new to science, including a rare amphibious mouse, a tree-climbing salamander and an unusual “blob-headed fish�. The 38-day survey recorded more than 2,000 species of wildlife and plants.

The findings are particularly surprising given the region’s high human population density, with significant pressures including deforestation and agriculture.

World’s largest ‘longitudinal cohort study’ reports that older teens and society’s most disadvantaged most likely to be affected

Most teenagers who have suffered from long Covid recover within two years, according to the largest study of its kind.

But the researchers said more work was needed to understand why some children still had ongoing health problems two years after infection.

Choosing Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH signals return to controversial and scientifically questionable health policies

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Jay Bhattacharya, an unofficial Covid adviser in Donald Trump’s first administration, has been selected as the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the leading biomedical research institutions in the world.

The choice of Bhattacharya, a Stanford economist whose proposal for widespread Covid-19 infection was backed by the White House, signals a return to controversial and scientifically questionable health policies in the second Trump administration, experts say.

RFK Jr has articulated what our Democratic and Republican leaders have largely ignored: our healthcare system is a national disgrace hiding in plain sight

Among the cast of characters poised to join the Trump administration, no one is as exasperating, polarizing or potentially dangerous as Robert F Kennedy Jr. But in a twist that is emblematic of our times, no single nominee has the potential to do as much good for the American people.

Bear with me. RFK Jr has been rightly pilloried for promoting a litany of theories linking vaccines with autism, chemicals in the water supply to gender identity, how people contract Aids and saying the Covid-19 vaccine, which in fact stemmed the deadliest pandemic of our lifetimes, was itself “the deadliest vaccine ever made�. He claimed Covid-19 was meant to target certain ethnic groups, Black people and Caucasians, while sparing Asians and Jewish people.

Patrick Ruane had targeted individuals online including chief medical officer

A Covid denier who suggested “whacking� Prof Sir Chris Whitty with a rounders bat has been jailed for five years after being convicted of encouraging terrorism.

Messages posted by Patrick Ruane on social media were described by a judge who sentenced him at the Old Bailey as “extremely dangerous� during a volatile time.

I tried Sora, OpenAI’s new tool, and it just left me sad. Are we ready for a world in which we can never tell what is real?

I recently had the opportunity to see a demo of Sora, OpenAI’s video generation tool which was released in the US on Monday, and it was so impressive it made me worried for the future. The new technology works like an AI text or image generator: write a prompt, and it produces a short video clip. In the pre-launch demo I was shown, an OpenAI representative asked the tool to create footage of a tree frog in the Amazon, in the style of a nature documentary. The result was uncannily realistic, with aerial camera shots swooping down on to the rainforest, before settling on a closeup of the frog. The animal looked as vivid and real as any nature documentary subject.

Yet despite the technological feat, as I watched the tree frog I felt less amazed than sad. It certainly looked the part, but we all knew that what we were seeing wasn’t real. The tree frog, the branch it clung to, the rainforest it lived in: none of these things existed, and they never had. The scene, although visually impressive, was hollow.

Victoria Turk is a London-based journalist covering technology, culture and society

A lot of talent is wasted in a world where more than half of laureates come from households in the richest 5%

We like scientific breakthroughs. Humanity ultimately relies on them. So it matters if we’re missing out on discoveries.

But compelling evidence that we are indeed missing out comes from a new study of the childhood background (measured on the basis of their father’s occupation) of some very successful scientists: Nobel laureates.

Scientists are increasingly finding that behaviours once seen as depraved often have a direct physical cause

The first thing that strikes me when I visit Alex in her supported accommodation is the huge lock on the kitchen door. The accessible rooms are devoid of any food or drink, the exception being two dispensers of sugar-free squash in the living room. Even the food-waste bin outside the back door is padlocked. Packages delivered to the home’s residents are opened in front of staff and searched for surreptitiously ordered food. These extraordinary efforts are crucial to prevent the housemates from eating too much.

For Alex and her fellow residents, their perpetual and insatiable hunger is not a matter of gluttony. It is not a marker of immorality, or depravity of the soul. It is a function of their biology. All those living in that house have a rare genetic disorder, Prader-Willi syndrome, which affects the region of the brain that controls appetite and hunger. For them, the signal to stop eating never materialises. People with this condition are destined never to feel full, sometimes even eating non-food items in the search for satiety. So extreme is their hunger that occasionally they will overeat to the point that they die of a perforated stomach, or choke on regurgitated food.

Guy Leschziner is a consultant neurologist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital trust. He is the author of Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human

Studies in which ChatGPT outperformed scientists and GPs raise troubling questions for the future of professional work

AI means too many (different) things to too many people. We need better ways of talking – and thinking – about it. Cue, Drew Breunig, a gifted geek and cultural anthropologist, who has come up with a neat categorisation of the technology into three use cases: gods, interns and cogs.

“Godsâ€�, in this sense, would be “super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomouslyâ€�. In other words, the AGI (artificial general intelligence) that OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his crowd are trying to build (at unconscionable expense), while at the same time warning that it could be an existential threat to humanity. AI gods are, Breunig says, the “human replacement use casesâ€�. They require gigantic models and stupendous amounts of “computeâ€�, water and electricity (not to mention the associated CO₂ emissions).

Dr Chris van Tulleken has been at the forefront of the campaign to change our food system and better regulate the sale of ultra-processed foods (UPF). This year he will be giving the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, Britain’s most prestigious public science lectures, in which he’ll be investigating how food has fundamentally shaped human evolution, the importance of our microbiome – as the extra ‘organ’ we didn’t know we had – and how we can all eat better in future, for the sake of our own health and the health of the planet.

Nicola Davis sat down with Van Tulleken to discuss the lectures, the challenge of understanding the impact of UPFs on our health, and his top tip for Christmas dinner. Madeleine Finlay hears from them both in this Christmas special edition of Science Weekly

Clips: Sky News

For the past 10 years cosmologists have been left scratching their heads over why two methods for measuring the universe’s rate of expansion provide totally different results. There are two possible solutions to the puzzle, known as the Hubble tension: either something is wrong with the measurements or something is wrong with our model of the universe. It was hoped that observations from the James Webb space telescope might shed some light on the problem, but instead results published last week have continued to muddy the waters. To understand why the expansion rate of the universe remains a mystery, and what might be needed to finally pin it down, Madeleine Finlay speaks to Catherine Heymans, the astronomer royal for Scotland and a professor of astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh

The Hubble constant: a mystery that keeps getting bigger

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On Monday Google unveiled its Willow quantum computing chip. The new chip takes just five minutes to complete tasks that would take 10 septillion years for some of the world’s fastest conventional computers to complete. But despite its impressive power, it’s not clear the chip has any practical applications. So does it bring quantum computing any closer? To find out Ian Sample speaks to Winfried Hensinger, professor of quantum technologies at the University of Sussex.

Because of industrial action taking place by members of the National Union of Journalists at the Guardian and Observer this week, you may notice some disruption to the availability of new episodes in your Guardian podcast feeds in the coming days. All the work on this episode was done before the strike action began. For more information please head to theguardian.com

Google unveils ‘mindboggling’ quantum computing chip

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Return pushed back to late March, stretching mission that was supposed to last eight days to more than nine months

The two Nasa astronauts who have been stuck in space since June because of technical issues will have to remain at the International Space Station even longer – stretching a mission that was originally supposed to last only eight days to more than nine months.

On Tuesday, Nasa announced that its astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, along with Russia’s cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, will return to Earth following the arrival of Crew-10 next year. Originally scheduled for a February launch, the space agency has pushed back the Crew-10 mission’s launch date to no earlier than late March of 2025.

Researchers find that varying stiffness and speeds at which skin grows lead to ‘mechanical’ formation of inward folds

It sounds like a conundrum that Rudyard Kipling would have explored in his Just So Stories, but researchers say they have the answer to how crocodiles get the scales on their heads.

Many animals, from turtles to birds, have scales – hard plate-like structures that form on the skin.

My father, Arno Rabinowitz, who has died aged 90, was a pioneering educational psychologist and a widely admired mentor, counsellor and confidant. His existence was down to a confluence of luck: his mother, Tilly, was one of three siblings evacuated from eastern Europe in the early 1920s during the pogroms against Jews. These three were “Ochberg Orphans�, fortunate recipients of the philanthropy of another émigré, the industrialist Isaac Ochberg, who enabled Jewish orphans to emigrate to safety in South Africa.

Arno was born in Johannesburg, to Tilly (nee Abrahams) and Danny Rabinowitz, a hotelier. He went to school at Highlands North in Johannesburg and later studied English and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1950s. There he was involved in clandestine anti-apartheid activities and was briefly a legal intern, in which capacity he saw Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo in court.

The solution to today’s puzzle

Earlier today I set you the following puzzle, which I read in the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo. Here it is again with the solution.

A liar who always lies says “All my hats are green.�

Literary logic

UPDATE: Read the solution here

Midway though the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo, two of the characters discuss a puzzle about hats. I thought it would make a perfect puzzle for this column, so here it is.

A liar who always lies says “All my hats are green.�

The answers to today’s puzzles

Earlier today I set you three problems from a maths competition for Martian schoolchildren. By Martian, I mean Hungarian.

In the mid-twentieth century, a generation of outstanding mathematicians and physicists from Hungary were humorously called Martians, as their intelligence was from another planet.

Do you have alien intelligence?

UPDATE: Solutions can be read here

Hungary acquired a reputation for brilliance in maths and physics in the middle of last century, thanks to scientists like John von Neumann, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner.

The stellar cohort become known as the Martians. The Hungarians, so the joke went, were evidence that superior alien intelligence had already landed on Earth. Even their language was impenetrable.

The Southern Sky Astrophotography 2024 exhibition displays the top entries from the 20th David Malin awards for Australian astronomers and photographers. The images are on display at the Sydney observatory until 1 February

Elon Musk's SpaceX has carried out the sixth test launch of its Starship rocket, with US president-elect Donald Trump joining Musk in Texas to watch the flight. The launch was a success but the company was unable to pull off a repeat of its fifth test where giant robot arms caught the rocket's booster as it fell back to the launchpad, preventing damage and allowing for reuse. SpaceX opted instead for a fiery splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico

• Donald Trump joins Elon Musk for SpaceX Starship rocket launch

The beaver moon, the final supermoon of the year, has appeared in skies across much of the globe