‘Australia’s beach culture is very fatphobic’: the summertime rise in body dissatisfaction

The idea that thinner or more muscular bodies are healthier remains deeply engrained in Australia, experts say. But there are ways to feel good in your body at the beach

• Read more summer essentials

Bella Davis has struggled with body dissatisfaction since she was eight years old. “I grew up thinking having a soft body was wrong,” says the now 29-year-old from the Central Coast.

As a teenager, Davis was “always striving to be thinner”, “obsessed with tracking calories” and “terrified to date” or be intimate with anybody in case they commented on her body.

Published: January 27, 2026, 2:00 pm

Strong v swole: the surprising truth about building muscle

Traditional bodybuilding advice has been to push workouts to the point of failure, and that soreness is an indicator of effectiveness. But recent studies show there’s another way

Until pretty recently, the conventional wisdom about building muscle was that it worked via a system you might think of as “tear and repair” – the idea being that working out causes microtears in the muscle fibres, which trigger the body’s repair processes, encouraging the muscles to come back bigger and stronger.

That’s why many old-school trainers will tell you that there’s no gain without pain, and why a lot of bodybuilding advice includes increasingly byzantine ways of pushing your biceps and triceps to the point where you can’t do another repetition: the more trauma you can cause, the thinking goes, the more “swole” you can become.

Published: January 26, 2026, 9:00 am

A new start after 60: I jumped in the sea for the first time, and finally began to heal

Despite living on an island, David Warr avoided the water for five decades – until a swimming teacher made the link between his fear and a childhood trauma

When David Warr was 11 he thought he was dying. At his school swimming lesson, he jumped in and swam – then realised with horror that his feet couldn’t feel the bottom. He recalls his teacher, standing on the side of the pool, shouting at him to “just swim” and his own immobilising fear. “I thought, ‘I can’t. I don’t know what to do.’ I started to panic hard. I thought, ‘She’s going to let me die.’”

Warr, 61, has blocked out how he reached safety, but for five decades he refused to go out of his depth again. He lives on the island of Jersey where water is a fact of life – but even when his sons were small, he would only wade a bit, and watch them swim with envy and pride. In contrast, he felt he was “battling the water”.

Published: January 26, 2026, 6:45 am

Eurostar sent a £120 voucher instead of the £1,744 it owes me

I was stranded in Brussels after a power failure, but the promised refund for hotels, food and transport failed to arrive

Eurostar is refusing to honour expenses claims after a power failure in the tunnel stranded thousands of passengers last month.

Our party of four was stuck at Brussels station when all trains to and from London were cancelled for 24 hours. Eurostar staff told us to find a hotel and handed out leaflets promising that accommodation, food and transport costs would be refunded.

Published: January 27, 2026, 7:00 am

‘Wake up to the risks of AI, they are almost here,’ Anthropic boss warns

Dario Amodei questions if human systems are ready to handle the ‘almost unimaginable power’ that is ‘potentially imminent’

• Business live – latest updates

• Quarter of Britons fear losing jobs to AI in next five years

Humanity is entering a phase of artificial intelligence development that will “test who we are as a species”, the boss of the AI startup Anthropic has said, arguing that the world needs to “wake up” to the risks.

Dario Amodei, a co-founder and the chief executive of the company behind the hit chatbot Claude, voiced his fears in a 19,000-word essay titled “The adolescence of technology”.

Published: January 27, 2026, 12:53 pm

California governor Gavin Newsom accuses TikTok of suppressing content critical of Trump

Newsom launched a review of the platform, despite TikTok saying a systems failure was responsible for the issue

California governor Gavin Newsom has accused TikTok of suppressing content critical of president Donald Trump, as he launched a review of the platform’s content moderation practices to determine if they violated state law, even as the platform blamed a systems failure for the issues.

The step comes after TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said last week it had finalised a deal to set up a majority US-owned joint venture that will secure US data, to avoid a US ban on the short video app used by more than 200 million Americans.

Published: January 27, 2026, 5:00 am

Life after Molly: Ian Russell on big tech, his daughter’s death – and why a social media ban won’t work

Molly Russell was just 14 when she took her own life in 2017, and an inquest later found negative online content was a significant factor. With many people now pushing for teenagers to be kept off tech platforms, her father explains why he backs a different approach

Ian Russell describes his life as being split into two parts: before and after 20 November 2017, the day his youngest daughter, Molly, took her own life as a result of depression and negative social media content. “Our life before Molly’s death was very ordinary. Unremarkable,” he says. He was a television producer and director, married with three daughters. “We lived in an ordinary London suburb, in an ordinary semi-detached house, the children went to ordinary schools.” The weekend before Molly’s death, they had a celebration for all three girls’ birthdays, which are in November. One was turning 21, another 18 and Molly was soon to be 15. “And I remember being in the kitchen of a house full of friends and family and thinking, ‘This is so good. I’ve never been so happy,’” he says. “That was on a Saturday night and the following Tuesday morning, everything was different.”

The second part of Russell’s life has been not only grief and trauma, but also a commitment to discovering and exposing the truth about the online content that contributed to Molly’s death, and campaigning to prevent others falling prey to the same harms. Both elements lasted far longer than he anticipated. It took nearly five years to get enough information out of social media companies for an inquest to conclude that Molly died “from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content”. As for the campaigning, the Molly Rose Foundation provides support, conducts research and raises awareness of online harms, and Russell has been an omnipresent spokesperson on these issues.

Published: January 26, 2026, 5:00 am

AI is hitting UK harder than other big economies, study finds

Britain is losing more jobs than it creates owing to artificial intelligence, Morgan Stanley research suggests

• More than a quarter of Britons fear losing job to AI in next five years

• Business live – latest updates

The UK is losing more jobs than it is creating because of artificial intelligence and is being hit harder than rival large economies, new research suggests.

British companies reported that AI had resulted in net job losses over the past 12 months, down 8% – the highest rate among other leading economies including the US, Japan, Germany and Australia, according to a study by the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Published: January 26, 2026, 8:41 am

EU launches inquiry into X over sexually explicit images made by Grok AI

Investigation comes after Elon Musk’s firm sparked outrage by allowing users to ‘strip’ photos of women and children

The European Commission has launched an investigation into Elon Musk’s X over the production of sexually explicit images and the spreading of possible child sexual abuse material by the platform’s AI chatbot, Grok.

The formal inquiry, launched on Monday, also extends an investigation into X’s recommender systems, algorithms that help users discover new content.

Published: January 26, 2026, 2:27 pm

Georgia leads push to ban datacenters used to power America’s AI boom

Southern state becoming ground zero in fight against rapid growth of facilities using huge amounts of energy and water

Lawmakers in several states are exploring passing laws that would put statewide bans in place on building new datacenters as the issue of the power-hungry facilities has moved to the center of economic and environmental concerns in the US.

In Georgia a state lawmaker has introduced a bill proposing what could become the first statewide moratorium on new datacenters in America. The bill is one of at least three statewide moratoriums on datacenters introduced in state legislatures in the last week as Maryland and Oklahoma lawmakers are also considering similar measures.

Published: January 26, 2026, 4:07 pm

How ICE is using facial recognition in Minnesota

Mobile Fortify app being used to scan faces of citizens and immigrants – but its use has prompted a severe backlash

Immigration enforcement agents across the US are increasingly relying on a new smartphone app with facial recognition technology.

The app is named Mobile Fortify. Simply pointing a phone’s camera at their intended target and scanning the person’s face allows Mobile Fortify to pull data on an individual from multiple federal and state databases, some of which federal courts have deemed too inaccurate for arrest warrants.

Published: January 27, 2026, 2:00 pm

At Davos, tech CEOs laid out their vision for AI’s world domination

Tech chiefs waxed poetic about AI to delegates at Davos. Plus, the ‘human’ drama of AI startups and why Tesla is thriving in Texas

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. This week’s edition is a team effort: my colleague Heather Stewart reports on the plans for AI’s world domination at Davos; I examine how huge investments have followed AI companies with little to their names but drama and dreams; and Nick Robins-Early spotlights how lax regulation of autonomous driving in Texas allowed Tesla to thrive.

Published: January 27, 2026, 12:57 pm

Pikachu and pals go wild: Pokémon theme park opens in Tokyo

From rhino-sized Rhyhorns to worm-like Diglett, visitors to PokéPark Kanto will roam a forest populated by lifelike Pokémon statues when the attraction opens next week

In Japan, February is normally a period of quiet reflection, a month defined by winter festivals in Sapporo’s snowy mountains and staving off the cold in steaming hot springs. Traditionally, international tourists start to arrive with the blossoms in spring – but thanks to the opening of Pokémon’s first ever amusement park on 5 February, this year, they are likely to come earlier.

Unlike the rollercoaster-filled thrills of Tokyo Disney Sea or Universal Studios Japan in Osaka, PokéPark Kanto is essentially a forest populated by models of the creatures from the perennially popular games. Nestled in the quiet Tokyo suburb of Inagi, half an hour from the city centre, the park is a walkable forest with more than 600 Pokémonin it. Where the Mario-themed Super Nintendo World slots neatly into the massive Universal Studios Japan, PokéPark Kanto is hidden in the back of the less glitzy, funfair-esque Japanese theme park Yomiuri Land.

Published: January 27, 2026, 3:04 pm

‘I didn’t have anything to prove’: what Traitors finalist Jade Scott learned about survival from video games

Accused, isolated and constantly under scrutiny, The Traitors contestant drew on years of social deduction gaming to stay calm under pressure

The latest series of The Traitors, which ended last week on a nail-biting finale, featured some of the usual characters – from guileless extroverts to wannabe Columbos endlessly observing fellow contestants for the slightest flicker of treachery. But one faithful stood out for her quiet determination, despite a ceaseless onslaught of suspicion and accusation. That person was Jade Scott, and I wasn’t at all surprised when, quite early on in the series, she revealed she was a keen gamer.

“Minecraft was my way in, when I was 15,” she says. “I made loads of friends at school playing that.” From this innocent introduction, however, she moved on to darker titles: the first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and the multiplayer battle-arena game Dota. “That’s where my interest in strategy gaming really kicked in,” she says.

Published: January 27, 2026, 11:30 am

Why I’m launching a feminist video games website in 2026

I’ve been a games journalist since 2007, but still there isn’t much video games coverage that feels like it’s specifically for people like me. So I’m creating a home for it: Mothership

Whether you’re reading about the impending AI bubble bursting or about the video game industry’s mass layoffs and cancelled projects, 2026 does not feel like a hopeful time for gaming. What’s more, games journalists – as well as all other kinds of journalists – have been losing their jobs at alarming rates, making it difficult to adequately cover these crises. Donald Trump’s White House, meanwhile, is using video game memes as ICE recruitment tools, and game studios are backing away from diversity and inclusion initiatives in response to the wider world’s slide to the right.

The manosphere is back, and we’ve lost mainstream feminist websites such as Teen Vogue; bigots everywhere are celebrating what they see as the death of “woke”. Put it all together and we have a dismal stew of doom for someone like me, a queer woman and a feminist who’s been a games journalist and critic since 2007.

Published: January 26, 2026, 11:00 am

Scientists launch AI DinoTracker app that identifies dinosaur footprints

Researchers say artificial intelligence system matches human expert classification about 90% of the time

Experts have created an app that uses artificial intelligence to identify dinosaurs from the footprints left behind after they stomped across the land tens of millions of years ago.

“When we find a dinosaur footprint, we try to do the Cinderella thing and find the foot that matches the slipper,” said Prof Steve Brusatte, a co-author of the work, from the University of Edinburgh. “But it’s not so simple, because the shape of a dinosaur footprint depends not only on the shape of the dinosaur’s foot but also the type of sand or mud it was walking through, and the motion of its foot.”

Published: January 26, 2026, 8:00 pm

Spider monkeys found to share ‘insider knowledge’ to help locate best food

Researchers observed the primates switching social groups and passing information on where to find the ripest fruit

Spider monkeys share tips about where to find food by changing their social groups in a “clever system for sharing insider knowledge”, research has shown.

They were observed to frequently switch subgroups of three or more individuals in a way that enabled them to share information about the location of fruit trees and timing of when they would ripen.

Published: January 26, 2026, 5:00 am

Starwatch: Moon occultation will ‘wink out’ Pleiades star cluster

Seven sisters constellation’s brightest members will be hidden from view for about an hour

On the night of 27 January, the moon passes in front of the Pleiades star cluster, temporarily hiding (occulting) some of its brightest members from view.

The Pleiades, also known as the seven sisters, lie about 440 light years away in the constellation Taurus, the Bull. They are one of the most recognisable structures in the winter sky. The stars were all born from the same giant cloud of molecular gas. Although in time they will be dispersed through the galaxy, at only 100m years old, they remain a relatively tight-knit community of stellar siblings.

Published: January 26, 2026, 6:00 am

Barbara Hurman obituary

My mother, Barbara Hurman, who has died aged 100, was an archaeologist specialising in the identification and illustration of finds – the items disinterred during the course of excavations.

She worked on a number of sites for the Bucks Museum, in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, the Milton Keynes Archaeological Unit, the Department of the Environment and the Museum of London, and in her late 70s completed four summer seasons as the finds supervisor and ceramic analyst on Nottingham University’s excavation of the Roman site at Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria.

Published: January 26, 2026, 11:51 am

Has the world entered an era of ‘water bankruptcy’? – podcast

Last week, a UN report declared that the world has entered an era of ‘global water bankruptcy’ with many human water systems past the point at which they can be restored to former levels. To find out what this could look like, Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, who has been reporting on Iran’s severe water crisis. And Mohammad Shamsudduha, professor of water crisis and risk reduction in the department of risk and disaster reduction at University College London, explains how the present situation arose and what can be done to bring water supplies back from the brink

Era of ‘global water bankruptcy’ is here, UN report says

Climate crisis or a warning from God? Iranians desperate for answers as water dries up

Published: January 27, 2026, 5:00 am

Strong v swole: the surprising truth about building muscle

Traditional bodybuilding advice has been to push workouts to the point of failure, and that soreness is an indicator of effectiveness. But recent studies show there’s another way

Until pretty recently, the conventional wisdom about building muscle was that it worked via a system you might think of as “tear and repair” – the idea being that working out causes microtears in the muscle fibres, which trigger the body’s repair processes, encouraging the muscles to come back bigger and stronger.

That’s why many old-school trainers will tell you that there’s no gain without pain, and why a lot of bodybuilding advice includes increasingly byzantine ways of pushing your biceps and triceps to the point where you can’t do another repetition: the more trauma you can cause, the thinking goes, the more “swole” you can become.

Published: January 26, 2026, 9:00 am