Meet the merpeople: ‘Once I put the tail on, my life was changed forever’

Professional mermaids risk hypothermia, seasickness and the cling of skin-tight silicone, but the reward is becoming an ‘ocean ambassador’ – and a bit more colour in the world

Propelled by a shimmering silicon tail, Katrin Gray spins underwater, blowing kisses to the audience as her long, copper hair floats around her face. Her seemingly effortless movement is anything but – a professional mermaid’s free diving and performance skills require training, practice and total concentration.

Mermaiding has become a global cottage industry, with pageants, conventions, retreats and meet-ups, where people gather in “pods” to practise their dolphin kicks. Makers create bespoke tail flukes, bejewelled bras, mermaid hair and even prosthetic gills for professional and hobbyist “seasters”. There is even a Netflix reality series called MerPeople, which documents the occasionally perilous journey of several aspiring professional merfolk. “No dead mermaids,” is the motto of one business featured.

Published: January 13, 2026, 2:00 pm

What does sugar do to your body – and how can you avoid a slump?

We evolved to like energy-dense foods such as honey, but modern diets tend to include too much sugar. Here’s how to make sure you eat the right amount, at the right time

Sugar tastes great for good reason: we evolved to like it, back when honey was a hard-to-get, energy-dense treat and we spent half of our time running around after antelope. Now that it’s much easier to get and we don’t move as much, that sweet tooth is working against us: many of us are consuming far too much of it, and suffering from poor health as a result. But is there anything specifically bad about it beyond it providing too many calories and not enough nutrients?

“When we taste sugar, the body starts reacting the moment sweetness touches the tongue,” says Dawn Menning, a registered dietitian who works with health app Nutu. “The brain recognises it as a quick source of energy and activates the reward system, releasing the feelgood chemical dopamine that makes it so appealing.” Interestingly, not everyone tastes sugar in exactly the same way – in 2015, researchers compared different types of siblings’ perception of sugar and sweeteners, and found that identical twins were more similar to each other in their sweet taste perception than fraternal twins or non-twin siblings. They concluded that genetic factors account for about 30% of the variance in how sensitive people are to sweet tastes – but it’s unclear whether that actually affects how much we eat.

Published: January 12, 2026, 10:00 am

Is it true that … stretching before exercise prevents injury?

Loosening your muscles is beneficial, but choosing the right type of movement for your chosen exercise is key

It depends on what kind of stretching you’re doing, says Dr Alex Dinsdale, senior lecturer in sport and exercise biomechanics at Leeds Beckett University.

Injuries, he says, happen for all sorts of reasons, from poor footwear to fatigue. Two key factors are not having the range of motion required or not being strong enough to control that motion. “You might go for a run and lift your knees higher than your hamstrings can manage,” he says. Or you might lack the muscle strength needed to handle moving a limb at speed.

Published: January 12, 2026, 8:00 am

Co-op refuses its will-writing service because I was born in Russia

This was even though I had revoked my citizenship and now have dual British and German nationality

I want to flag a discriminatory experience I’ve had with the Co-op’s will-writing service.

I asked it to update a will it had drawn up for me in 2020, with my partner and our daughter as the beneficiaries. I received no follow-up for two months.

Published: January 13, 2026, 7:00 am

Keir Starmer tells MPs he is open to social media ban for young people

PM says he is alarmed at reports about children’s screen time and has shifted position on Australian-style policy

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has told MPs he is open to the idea of an Australian-style ban on social media for young people after becoming concerned about the amount of time children and teenagers are spending on their phones.

The prime minister told Labour MPs on Monday evening he had become alarmed at reports about five-year-olds spending hours in front of screens each day, as well as increasingly worried about the damage social media is doing to under-16s.

Published: January 13, 2026, 12:00 pm

Can X be banned under UK law and what are the other options?

UK media regulator is investigating whether X has breached the Online Safety Act – what could happen next?

The UK government is threatening Elon Musk’s X with the nuclear option under the country’s online safety laws: a ban. The social media platform is under pressure from ministers after it allowed the Grok AI tool, which is integrated within the app, to generate indecent images of unsuspecting women and children.

The government has said it will support the media regulator Ofcom, which has launched an investigation into X, if it decides to push ahead with a ban. But is such a move likely?

Published: January 13, 2026, 9:39 am

Home Office TikTok account posting deportation footage accused of turning ‘brutality into clickbait’

Video of raids and migrant arrests shared by profile with slogan ‘restoring order and control to our borders’

A Home Office TikTok account posting footage of deportations and arrests set to dramatic music has been criticised for turning “brutality” into “clickbait”.

An account called @SecureBordersUK was created on Tuesday with the slogan: “Restoring order and control to our borders.”

Published: January 13, 2026, 1:58 pm

An ecosystem of smuggled tech holds Iran’s last link to the outside world

Despite internet blackout, a small number of Iranians are risking their lives to share messages as protests continue

For most of Iran, the internet was shut off on Thursday afternoon – the most severe blackout the country has seen in years of internet shutdowns, coming after days of escalating anti-government protests.

For a very small sliver of the country, it is still possible to get photos and videos to the outside world, and even to make calls. The Telegram channel Vahid Online on Monday posted photos of dead bodies lying next to a street in Kahrizak, on the southern outskirts of Tehran; on Sunday, it shared a video of Iranians chanting “death to Khamenei” at a funeral.

Published: January 13, 2026, 5:00 am

Google parent Alphabet hits $4tn valuation after AI deal with Apple

After Apple chose Gemini to power Siri, Alphabet surpassed Apple to become second-most valuable company in world

Google’s parent company hit a major financial milestone on Monday, reaching a $4tn valuation for the first time and surpassing Apple to become the second-most valuable company in the world.

Alphabet is the fourth company to hit the $4tn milestone after Nvidia, which later hit $5tn, Microsoft and Apple.

Published: January 12, 2026, 5:14 pm

Publishers fear AI search summaries and chatbots mean ‘end of traffic era’

Media bosses expect web referrals to plunge and want journalists to emulate content creators, report finds

Media companies expect web traffic to their sites from online searches to plummet over the next three years, as AI summaries and chatbots change the way consumers use the internet.

An overwhelming majority are also planning to encourage their journalists to behave more like YouTube and TikTok content creators this year, as short-form video and audio content continues to boom.

Published: January 12, 2026, 6:00 am

The best Apple Watches in 2026: what’s worth buying and what’s not, according to our expert

There’s no need to buy new – unless your model’s ready for retirement. Our technology expert compares the top Apple smartwatches available right now

• The best running watches – tested

The best Apple Watch may be the one already on your wrist.

Each generation of Apple’s smartwatch is fairly iterative, with most of the best features added via software updates, which means there’s no need to buy a new device each year. That said, if your watch has seen better days, or it’s stopped receiving updates, then your best options are set out below.

Best Apple Watch for most people:
SE 3

Best mid-range Apple Watch:
Series 11

Published: January 13, 2026, 10:00 am

Amazon insists I return a phone it says ‘may be lost’

I have paid two monthly £108 instalments but am now phone-less and out of pocket

I ordered a £544 phone from Amazon. A tracking update later informed me that it “may be lost” and I could request a refund. I pressed the refund option and was directed to customer service, which insisted I wait a week to claim.

A week later I was told I needed to file an incident report from the email address associated with my account. When I complied, the report was rejected as coming from an address that “didn’t meet certain security standards”.

Published: January 12, 2026, 7:00 am

Four months and 40 hours later: my epic battle with 2025’s most difficult video game

When Hollow Knight: Silksong came out last summer I was in so much pain that I didn’t know if I’d be able to play it. Could a video game teach me anything new about suffering?

Last year I became uncomfortably well acquainted with suffering. In March I started experiencing excruciating pain in my right arm and shoulder – burning, zapping, energy-sapping pain that left me unable to think straight, emanating from a nexus of torment behind my shoulder blade and sometimes stretching all the way up to the base of my skull and all the way down into my fingers. Typing was agony, but everything was painful; even at rest it was horrible. I couldn’t play my guitar; I couldn’t play video games; I couldn’t sleep. I learned how quickly physical suffering lacerates your mental wellbeing.

I’d had episodes of nagging pain from so-called repetitive strain injuries before, the product of long hours hunched over laptops and game controllers over the course of decades, but nothing like this. A few months later, after the initial unrelenting agony had subsided to a permanent hum of more moderate pain, it was diagnosed as brachial neuritis, inflammation of the nerve path that travels from the base of your neck down to your hand. (Nobody knows what causes it, but it sometimes happens after an infection or an injury.) The good news, I was told by a neurologist, was that it usually gets better in about one to three years, and I hadn’t lost any function in my right hand. The bad news was that there was nothing much to be done about the pain in the meantime.

Published: January 12, 2026, 11:10 am

Love Machines by James Muldoon review – inside the uncanny world of AI relationships

A sociologist talks to the people putting their faith – and their hearts – in the hands of robots

If much of the discussion of AI risk conjures doomsday scenarios of hyper-intelligent bots brandishing nuclear codes, perhaps we should be thinking closer to home. In his urgent, humane book, sociologist James Muldoon urges us to pay more attention to our deepening emotional entanglements with AI, and how profit-hungry tech companies might exploit them. A research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute who has previously written about the exploited workers whose labour makes AI possible, Muldoon now takes us into the uncanny terrain of human-AI relationships, meeting the people for whom chatbots aren’t merely assistants, but friends, romantic partners, therapists, even avatars of the dead.

To some, the idea of falling in love with an AI chatbot, or confiding your deepest secrets to one, might seem mystifying and more than a little creepy. But Muldoon refuses to belittle those seeking intimacy in “synthetic personas”.

Published: January 13, 2026, 7:00 am

‘A bombshell’: doubt cast on discovery of microplastics throughout human body

Exclusive: Some scientists say many detections are most likely error, with one high-profile study called a ‘joke’

High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell”.

Studies claiming to have revealed micro and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years.

Published: January 13, 2026, 2:20 pm

Primates’ same-sex sexual behaviour ‘may reinforce bonds amid environmental stress’

Behaviour among non-human species could help keep groups together in face of social challenges, says study

Same-sex sexual behaviour among non-human primates may arise as a way to reinforce bonds and keep societies together in the face of environmental or social challenges, researchers have suggested.

Prof Vincent Savolainen, a co-author of the paper from Imperial College London, added that while the work focused on our living evolutionary cousins, early human species probably experienced similar challenges, raising the likelihood they, too, showed such behaviour.

Published: January 12, 2026, 4:00 pm

How to sleep well in 2026 – podcast

Ian Sample puts listeners’ questions on sleep to Dr Allie Hare, consultant physician in respiratory and sleep medicine at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals and president of the British Sleep Society. They cover why women experience sleep disturbance during the menopause, why sleep paralysis affects some people more than others, and what scientists know about the link between sleep and dementia. Hare also gives her top tips for getting better sleep in 2026

Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod

Published: January 13, 2026, 5:00 am

The friendship secret: why socialising could help you live longer

Neuroscientist Ben Rein is on a mission to show that being around others not only feels good, but can even improve recovery from strokes, cancer and heart attacks. So why are so many of us isolated and glued to our phones?

‘I hate it.” I’ve asked the neuroscientist Ben Rein how he feels about the online sea of junk neuroscience we swim in – the “dopamine fasts”, “serotonin boosts” and people “regulating” their “nervous system” – and this is his kneejerk response. He was up early with his newborn daughter at his home in Buffalo, New York, but he’s fresh-faced and full of beans on a video call, swiftly qualifying that heartfelt statement. “Let me clarify my position: I don’t hate it when it’s accurate, but it’s rarely accurate.”

He draws my attention to a reel he saw recently on social media of a man explaining that reframing pain as “neurofeedback, not punishment” activates the anterior cingulate cortex (a part of the brain involved in registering pain). “That’s genuinely never been studied; you are just making this up,” he says. He posted a pithy response on Instagram, pleading with content creators to “leave neuroscience out of it”. “That’s why I think it’s especially important for real scientists to be on the internet,” he says. “We need to show the public what it looks like to speak responsibly and accurately about science.”

Published: January 12, 2026, 5:00 am

The pulmonaut: how James Nestor turned breathing into a 3m copy bestseller

It is the most essential thing we do - yet many of us arguably breathe badly. The author of Breath explains how that can be changed

In the last stages of writing his book, Breath, James Nestor was stressed. “Which was ironic when writing a book about breathing patterns and mellowing out,” he says. The book was late; he’d spent his advance and was haemorrhaging even more money on extra research that was taking him off in new, potentially interesting, directions – was it really necessary, he wondered, to go to Paris to look at old skulls buried in catacombs beneath the city? (It was.)

Then a couple of months before the book’s May 2020 publication date, the Covid pandemic hit, and Nestor was advised to wait it out. He couldn’t afford to. “One of the main motivations for releasing it at that time was to get that [on-publication] advance,” he says. “But I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to release it. I said: ‘How are you going to promote a book that can’t be sold in stores, that I can’t tour for?’” He expected, he says, “absolutely zero to happen”.

Published: January 13, 2026, 5:00 am

Starwatch: Behold Taurus, the Babylonian bull of heaven

Recorded in cave drawings as far back as 1000BC, this is one of the oldest zodiacal constellations to be recognised in its modern form

Taurus, the bull, is our focus this week. One of the oldest constellations to be recognised in its modern form, it was recorded as the bull of heaven in Babylonian records from about 1000BC, but cave drawings from Lascaux, France, suggest that humans may already have associated the stars with a bull approximately 14,000 years earlier.

Taurus sits on the ecliptic, the path that the Sun follows around the sky throughout the year, so it is known as a zodiacal constellation. The brightest star in the constellation is the red giant star Aldebaran. In Arabic, its name means “eye of the bull”.

Published: January 12, 2026, 6:00 am

He invented mini saunas for frogs – now this biologist has big plans to save hundreds of species

A deadly fungus has already wiped out 90 species and threatens 500 more but Anthony Waddle is hoping gene replacement could be their salvation

Standing ankle-deep in water between two bare cottonwood trees on a hot spring day, eight-year-old Anthony Waddle was in his element. His attention was entirely absorbed by the attempt to net tadpoles swimming in a reservoir in the vast Mojave desert.

It was “one of the perfect moments in my childhood”, he says.

Published: January 13, 2026, 5:00 am