SMC Spain

An analysis based on Google Trends data collected between 2005 and 2025 showed that the proportion of menopause-related searches referring to commercial products and services increased by between 15 and 20 percentage points in the UK, Australia and the US. These findings suggest that people may increasingly be seeking non-clinical approaches to managing the menopause, not only for symptom relief but also for guidance, monitoring and support outside of clinical consultations. The study is published today in the journal JAMA Network Open.

A new United Nations (UN) report assesses the annual environmental costs of artificial intelligence (AI). According to the report, by 2030, if data centers were a country, their electricity consumption would be on par with that of France. As for carbon dioxide emissions, these could reach 400 million tons of CO₂ equivalent, comparable to the total emissions of the United Kingdom. The 9.3 trillion liters of water they use would cover the drinking water needs of the planet’s 8.1 billion people for 1.6 years. The report notes that the generation of high-resolution videos is at the top of AI’s energy consumption. Furthermore, it highlights the growing digital divide and environmental injustice between the nations that control AI systems and those that bear their environmental costs, particularly in the Global South.

The so-called ‘Iceman’, Ötzi, who lived approximately 5,300 years ago, was discovered in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps, on the border between Austria and Italy. His mummified remains were preserved at -6°C in a museum to replicate the conditions in which they were found. Now, a team from Italy has discovered that he contains communities of both ancient and modern microorganisms, some of which may be metabolically active or capable of replicating under the current preservation conditions, although, for the moment, no damage has been detected. According to the researchers, this demonstrates that “the ‘Iceman’ is not a static relic, but a dynamic biological interface.” The results are published in Microbiome. 

We often see headlines claiming that new research has found a ‘cure’ for diseases. However, what are the real chances of this being true? How does the current stage of the research affect its ultimate outcome? Has it already been tested on humans, or only on laboratory animals? In this article, we explain why animals are used in biomedicine, the reasons why mice are the most commonly used, the steps and timeframes involved from when a treatment appears effective until it can be determined whether it works in people, the characteristics and limitations of various disease models, and how results should be communicated to inform the public without raising false hopes.

Countries’ current climate commitments fall short of the targets needed to limit global warming to 1.5 °C this century, with a shortfall of more than 5 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2050. This is one of the conclusions of the third edition of the report The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal. To offset this shortfall, the report estimates that carbon dioxide removal would need to grow at a rate comparable to that of the fastest clean energy transitions, such as solar power or electric vehicles. The report highlights that the world removes around 2.2 billion tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere each year, almost entirely through land-based actions such as forest restoration. New technologies that use machinery or minerals to store carbon account for just 0.1% of total removal.

An article published in Brain Health proposes using the concept of the ‘criticome’ to refer to the sensory, motor, social, cultural and environmental information recorded from pregnancy up to the age of 25, which is the period of greatest brain plasticity. According to the authors, this concept reframes autism, schizophrenia and depression as developmental disorders rather than purely synaptic disorders. Besides, they say this approach would have implications for educational policy, mental health care and screen use, amongst other issues.

An international team led by the National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN-CSIC) and the University of Toronto (Canada) has discovered that Homo erectus were already using fire on a regular basis 1.07 million years ago and 1.79 million years ago at the Wonderwerk Cave (South Africa). Previous evidence had placed more regular and controlled use of fire one million years ago in Africa at that same site. The team, whose study is published in PLoS ONE, used a novel non-invasive technique based on luminescence.

An international team has published the five-year follow-up results of a phase 2b clinical trial testing a personalised cancer vaccine in combination with standard immunotherapy treatment for melanoma. After this period, the probability of cancer recurrence was around 50% lower in the group of patients who received the vaccine. Furthermore, the probability of metastasis was almost 60% lower. The results are being presented at the ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) conference and published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

A team from the University of California (USA) has published an article questioning the scientific evidence supporting bans on social media for teenagers. Among other reasons, they argue that studies conducted to date on restricting social media use have focused on adults. Furthermore, as one of the authors points out in a press release, these restriction experiments "show weak, negligible, and mixed effects, with 40% of experimental studies reporting harmful effects (e.g., lower life satisfaction and increased loneliness) or no effect from social media restrictions." Some of the authors, whose article is published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, declare having ties to companies in the social media industry.

A team from the United States analyzed blood levels of three biomarkers associated with Alzheimer’s disease in 1,350 people without dementia, with an average age of 61. Higher levels were associated with poorer cognitive performance five years later, leading the authors to state that the findings “demonstrate the potential for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease in middle-aged adults through blood tests.” In a related commentary, two experts who did not participate in the study state that, in young populations without cognitive impairment, these tests “may generate a higher rate of false positives” and caution that “they are not suitable for mass, non-selective screening for Alzheimer’s disease pathology in cognitively healthy populations or in the general community.” The study is published in The Lancet.