One in five women in England say their concerns were ignored during childbirth, survey finds

Women say fears were dismissed and help was unavailable at crucial moments during labour

Almost one in five women feel their concerns were not taken seriously by healthcare professionals during childbirth, according to the “concerning” results of a national survey of maternity experiences.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) survey of almost 17,000 women who gave birth across England in NHS settings this year found that 15% felt they had not been given relevant advice or support when they contacted a midwife at the start of their labour, while 18% said their concerns had not been taken seriously.

Published: December 10, 2025, 5:55 pm

Disney to invest $1bn in OpenAI, allowing characters in Sora video tool

Agreement comes amid anxiety in Hollywood over impact of AI on the industry, expression and rights of creators

Walt Disney has announced a $1bn equity investment in OpenAI, enabling the AI startup’s Sora video generation tool to use its characters.

Users of Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that draw on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters as part of a three-year licensing agreement between OpenAI and the entertainment giant.

Published: December 11, 2025, 2:31 pm

‘Already had a profound effect’: parents react to Australia’s social media ban

We asked you to share your views on your children’s use of social media and how the ban is affecting your family. Here is what you told us

For some parents, social media sucks up their children’s time and steals them away from family life, instilling mental health issues along the way. For others, it provides their children with an essential line to friends, family, connection and support.

When Australia’s social media ban came into effect on Wednesday, millions of under-16s lost access to their accounts and were prevented from creating new ones.

Published: December 10, 2025, 7:28 pm

‘What to buy Dad for Christmas’: is retail ready for the AI shopping shift?

As shoppers ask ChatGPT for inspiration, brands scramble to ensure their products appeal to the bots calling the shots

• Consumer test drive: can AI do your Xmas gift shopping for you?

Christmas shopping – some love it, to others it’s a chore, and this year for the first time many of us will outsource the annual task of coming up with gift ideas to artificial intelligence.

While traditional internet search, social media – especially TikTok and Instagram – and simply wandering a local high street will still be the main routes to presents for most this year, about a quarter of people in the UK are already using AI to find the right products, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Published: December 10, 2025, 1:00 pm

From ‘glacier aesthetic’ to ‘poetcore’: Pinterest predicts the visual trends of 2026 based on its search data

If search interest holds, glitchy glam, cool blue, aliencore and gummy bear aesthetics are among the vibes set to rock the creative world next year

Next year, we’ll mostly be indulging in maximalist circus decor, working on our poetcore, hunting for the ethereal or eating cabbage in a bid for “individuality and self-preservation”, according to Pinterest.

The organisation’s predictions for Australian trends in 2026 have landed, which – according to the platform used by interior decorators, fashion lovers and creatives of all stripes – includes 1980s, aliens, vampires and “forest magic”.

Published: December 10, 2025, 6:58 am

ICE is using smartwatches to track pregnant women, even during labor: ‘She was so afraid they would take her baby’

Pregnant immigrants in ICE monitoring programs are avoiding care, fearing detention during labor and delivery

In early September, a woman, nine months pregnant, walked into the emergency obstetrics unit of a Colorado hospital. Though the labor and delivery staff caring for her expected her to have a smooth delivery, her case presented complications almost immediately.

The woman, who was born in central Asia, checked into the hospital with a smartwatch on her wrist, said two hospital workers who cared for her during her labor, and whom the Guardian is not identifying to avoid exposing their hospital or patients to retaliation.

Published: December 10, 2025, 1:15 pm

Teenagers are presenting Christmas wishlists, Powerpoint-style – my daughter included

A far cry from hand-scrawled letters to Santa, on graphic design platform Canva users have created a whopping 1.4m Christmas wishlist presentations

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Twas three weeks before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for my 13-year-old daughter, who emerged from her lair with a level of vim uncommon in daylight hours.

As she made her approach with laptop aglow, her droll little mouth was drawn up in a bow. It then became apparent that I was about to become the audience (some may say “victim”) of a recent cultural phenomenon: the Christmas wishlist slideshow.

Published: December 11, 2025, 2:00 pm

14 unexpected US gifts to give the men in your life this holiday season

From Crocs to indestructible wallets, we rounded up the best guy-approved gifts they won’t know how they lived without

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Whether you have been together for years, just made it official, or maybe you’re just shopping for your brother, one thing remains certain: he is going to claim he doesn’t need anything. The special guys in our lives often default to what they’ve always used and loved, from threadbare T-shirts to melted spatulas.

This season, give him the gift of novelty. Introduce him to a new gadget he hasn’t thought of for his man-cave (yes, our respondents still have those). Show him that it’s OK to cry with a personalized keepsake commemorating your shared history. Introduce a little color into his life if his year has been a bit bleak.

Published: December 10, 2025, 8:15 pm

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – how a tiny studio developed the Belle Époque-set gaming blockbuster

What started as Guillaume Broche’s personal project has been nominated for 12 Game awards, sold more than 2m copies and been praised by Emmanuel Macron as a ‘shining example of French audacity’

The record-breaking 12 nominations at the Game awards this year was beyond the wildest dreams of Guillaume Broche when he first began inking out Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as a personal project while working at Ubisoft.

Before selling more than 2m copies, the narrative-driven roleplaying game with “a unique world, challenging combat and great writing” was a technical demo called We Lost. It was Broche’s appetite for risk and a few hopeful Reddit posts that would create the game’s world of Lumiere and its struggle against the Paintress.

Published: December 11, 2025, 10:00 am

As AI floods our culture, here’s why we must protect human storytelling in games

Buying the Zombies, Run! studio wasn’t part of my plan, but our post-apocalypse ​game has a story that makes people feel seen

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A few days ago, I clicked a button on my phone to send funds to a company in Singapore and so took ownership of the video game I co-created and am lead writer for: Zombies, Run! I am a novelist, I wrote the bestselling, award-winning The Power, which was turned into an Amazon Prime TV series starring Toni Collette. What on earth am I doing buying a games company?

Well. First of all. Zombies, Run! is special. It’s special to me – the game started as a Kickstarter and the community that grew up around it has always been incredibly supportive of what we’re doing. And it’s special in what it does. It’s a game to exercise with. You play it on your smartphone – iPhone or Android – and we tell stories from the zombie apocalypse in your headphones to encourage you to go further, faster, or just make exercise less boring. Games are so often portrayed as the bad entertainment form, but I made a game that fundamentally helps people to be healthier.

Published: December 10, 2025, 3:00 pm

Endoscopy finds Neanderthal noses not as adapted to the cold as expected

Study on skull of Altamura Man could be blow to adaptation theories about Neanderthals and their extinction

One sign of a really cold day is the sharp sting of freezing air in your nose. It was believed that the noses of Neanderthals were better adapted to breathing the cold air of the Ice Age and that when the climate became warmer they were outcompeted by modern humans. This is now being questioned.

The opening in the Neanderthal skull is bigger than ours, with a larger nasal cavity behind it. This was thought to have bony convolutions to warm and moisten the incoming air, similar to those seen on some arctic mammals. These delicate structures would only survive in an exceptionally well-preserved skull though, so it was never clear whether they were actually present.

Published: December 11, 2025, 6:00 am

Orcas team up with dolphins to hunt salmon, study finds

Northern resident killer whales appear to use dolphins as ‘scouts’, in a surprising cooperative hunting strategy

Orcas and dolphins have been spotted for the first time working as a team to hunt salmon off the coast of British Columbia, according to a new study which suggests a cooperative relationship between the two predators.

The research, published on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, shows interactions between northern resident orcas (also known as killer whales) and Pacific white-sided dolphins are not just chance encounters while foraging.

Published: December 11, 2025, 4:00 pm

Social media and ADHD diagnosis, new mpox strain in England and early firestarters – podcast

The Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample, sits down with co-host Madeleine Finlay to discuss three eye-catching stories from the week, including a study investigating the link between social media use in children and rising rates of ADHD diagnosis. Also on the agenda is groundbreaking evidence that humans were starting fires 350,000 years earlier than previously known, and the discovery of a new strain of the mpox virus in England

England health officials identify newly evolved variant of mpox

Social media use damages children’s ability to focus, say researchers

Published: December 11, 2025, 5:00 am

Nasa loses contact with spacecraft orbiting Mars for more than a decade

Space agency is investigating after Maven abruptly stopped communicating to ground stations over the weekend

Nasa has lost contact with a spacecraft that has orbited Mars for more than a decade, though the US space agency said it was trying to re-establish a communications link.

Maven abruptly stopped communicating to ground stations over the weekend. Nasa said this week that the spacecraft had been working fine before it went behind the red planet. When it reappeared, there was only silence. “Telemetry showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind [Mars],” Nasa said in a statement.

Published: December 10, 2025, 9:22 pm

Humans made fire 350,000 years earlier than previously thought, discovery in Suffolk suggests

Groundbreaking find makes compelling case that humans were lighting fires much earlier than originally believed

Humans mastered the art of creating fire 400,000 years ago, almost 350,000 years earlier than previously known, according to a groundbreaking discovery in a field in Suffolk.

It is known that humans used natural fire more than 1m years ago, but until now the earliest unambiguous example of humans lighting fires came from a site in northern France dating from 50,000 years ago.

Published: December 10, 2025, 4:00 pm

Humans rank above meerkats but below beavers in monogamy league table

Human beings in 7th place out of 35 species on monogamy scale, according to a study by Cambridge University

Humans are playing in the premier league of monogamous mammals, according to a new ranking of animals by their reproductive habits, but we may need a new manager to beat the beavers.

In the study from University of Cambridge, humans ranked 7th out of 35 species on the monogamy scale, pipping white-handed gibbons and meerkats, but lagging behind moustached tamarins and Eurasian beavers.

Published: December 10, 2025, 12:01 am

Should people wear a mask in public if they feel unwell with flu?

With NHS and No 10 advice differing, we look at best practice for flu prevention and protection

An NHS leader has said people who are unwell with flu “must” wear a mask in public. A UK government official has said if you need to go out while sick, you should only “consider” wearing a mask.

So what is the official advice, how serious is the threat posed by flu, and what should you do if have symptoms?

Published: December 10, 2025, 4:47 pm

Synthetic chemicals in food system creating health burden of $2.2tn a year, report finds

Scientists issue urgent warning about chemicals, found to cause cancer and infertility as well as harming environment

Scientists have issued an urgent warning that some of the synthetic chemicals that help underpin the current food system are driving increased rates of cancer, neurodevelopmental conditions and infertility, while degrading the foundations of global agriculture.

The health burden from phthalates, bisphenols, pesticides and Pfas “forever chemicals” amounts to up to $2.2tn a year – roughly as much as the profits of the world’s 100 largest publicly listed companies, according to the report published on Wednesday.

Published: December 10, 2025, 6:00 am

The UK’s pharma deal was vital – but the GSK boss is right about US dominance | Nils Pratley

It would be absurd to claim the UK has suddenly become a life-sciences leader thanks to the new pricing and tariffs pact

That’s gratitude, eh? It’s not even a fortnight since the government agreed to raise the prices the NHS pays for new medicines and here comes the boss of GSK, Britain’s second largest pharma firm, to extol the virtues of doing business in the US.

The US is “still the leading market in the world in terms of the launches of new drugs and vaccines”, said the chief executive, Emma Walmsley, in a BBC interview, explaining why GSK invests about three times as much over there as it does at home. Alongside China, the US is also “the best market in the world to do business development”.

Published: December 11, 2025, 6:57 pm

Geminid meteor shower: where to watch Australia’s biggest shooting star show this weekend

Stargazers will be able to see potentially dozens of meteors an hour, with the peak on Sunday night

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They’re bright, they’re plentiful and the Geminids – which make up what’s regarded as one of the best annual meteor showers to witness – are about to reach their peak viewing time.

The Geminid meteors have already been active in our skies since 4 December, building up to the best night of the year to see them on Sunday.

Published: December 10, 2025, 11:00 pm