Introducing tight bands in socks around the ball of the foot seems to make walking and running easier. The effects of these socks, which stiffen the feet, are equivalent to the reduced energy expenditure that the average person would experience if they lost 2 kilograms, according to the researchers behind them.

at the University of Texas at Austin says he hopes to see elite runners in the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics using these socks, which he developed with , also at the University of Texas at Austin. “Our back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that wrapping the foot in the new socks could improve marathon performance by 1 to 2 minutes,” says Beck.

Since diverging from chimpanzees around 6 million years ago, human feet have become much stiffer than those of other apes, which assisted our bipedalism. Beck and Tang first wondered if they could take this stiffness further by tweaking footwear. However, previous attempts to reduce walking and running effort using shoes with stiffer midsoles or inserts have failed, so then the pair turned to socks.

They are made of a common synthetic yarn blend, typical of athletic socks. Beck and Tang tightly knitted three 1-millimetre wide bands at a 30-millimetre-wide region around the ball of the foot. This results in 24 times more pressure being applied to feet compared with regular, control socks.

To test them, they recruited 12 adults of both sexes who had no known health conditions. The researchers analysed how they walked while wearing the foot-stiffening socks, control socks and no socks.

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Participants then walked on a treadmill while wearing shoes with the stiffened socks and control ones for 5 minutes. Beck and Tang measured their VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen the body can absorb during high-intensity exercise. This allowed them to determine how much energy they burned in each of the walking experiments, known as metabolic expenditure.

The foot-stiffening socks reduced this expenditure in 10 of 12 of the participants by 2 per cent more than the control socks. That is equivalent to the average person losing 2 kilograms, according to the researchers.

This reduced expenditure probably doesn’t mean the socks lead to wearers getting fewer health benefits, such as weight loss, from walking or running compared with those wearing regular socks, says Beck. “Reducing the whole-body metabolic rate means we have better walking endurance, we sweat less during hot days and we can walk faster for the same effort [that we would use] using commercially available socks.”

The socks work by enabling the ankle and its muscles to push off at a slower velocity, he says. This requires less activation and less metabolic energy, leading to more economical muscle contractions. Unlike a stiffened shoe, the socks allow the toes to flex and the arch to recoil more freely, he says.

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at the University of Oxford says the idea that a stiff foot makes walking less metabolically costly has been around for a long time, but nobody had managed to show it in people while they were walking until now. “The team’s clever insight was that those earlier attempts [with shoes] also stopped the foot moving when it needs to, right at the end of the step.”

The applications of the socks are yet to be tested. But Beck says that, in theory, anyone whose feet have lost some of their shape, say through old age, could benefit. The researchers already have a sponsored research agreement with the shoe company New Balance to commercialise the socks, says Beck.

However, Püschel warns that other explanations for the results cannot be ruled out, such as the volunteers changing how they walked when they knew they had the socks on. “It’s a promising first demonstration, rather than evidence that these socks will change anyone’s daily life,” he says.

Young children selected to be sacrificed as part of elaborate Inca rituals were given psychedelic and intoxicating substances, possibly to relieve the terror of their imminent death or in the belief that the drugs would help them communicate with the gods.

“We cannot reconstruct the children’s emotions or determine precisely how they experienced these events,” says at the University of Warsaw, Poland. “However, we should not assume that being selected for a prestigious religious ceremony necessarily meant that the experience was not frightening or traumatic.”

The Inca kingdom dominated 4000 kilometres of the west coast of South America from the late 13th century until the Spanish conquest of the 16th century.

In a ritual known as capacocha, children and young women were sacrificed to the mountain gods. According to an account by Spanish friar Martín de Murúa, , the capacocha ceremony was conducted to ensure there would be “no famine nor lack of fruits of the earth, nor would there be drought, nor pestilence, nor rebellion”.

Socha and her colleagues studied eight frozen, mummified children, seven of whom were girls, discovered between the 1920s and 90s at sites in Peru, Argentina and Chile. They are thought to have been aged between 6 and 14 when they died. It is thought some were killed with sharp weapons, while others were buried alive, says Socha.

The researchers analysed the mummies’ hair and nail samples to determine which psychoactive plants were given to children during the capacocha ritual.

Toxicological screening detected cocaine in all the hair samples, along with markers of alcohol and coca leaf chewing in half of the individuals. The team also identified harmine, a hallucinogenic compound found in the ceremonial drink ayahuasca, in one of the nail samples.

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Socha and her colleagues suggest that the antidepressant properties of harmine could have been used to calm the children and maintain a positive mood.

Each sacrifice seemed to be associated with a unique chemical signature preserved in the child’s hair and nails. This may indicate that each child was “prepared” in a different way, perhaps to direct their sacrifice towards a specific deity.

“We are beginning to understand capacocha not simply as a single sacrificial event, but as a complex process involving extensive preparations, long journeys and different ritual practices,” says Socha.

Struggling with a difficult mental task? Zapping the brain region linked to our motivation to make a mental effort might help – for a while. People who had this part of their brain stimulated by electrical currents excelled at a difficult task, but also became more mentally fatigued afterwards.

“Their performance is much better; however, this good performance comes with lower motivation in the end,” says at the University of Munich, Germany.

Xia and her colleagues put electrodes on the heads of 31 volunteers with no known health conditions. During a half-hour session in an MRI scanner, the volunteers spent 20 minutes doing the 3-back memory test, where you have to remember and identify the third item back as an ongoing sequence is presented to you – a very demanding mental task. They were then offered €1 for doing an easy test or €2 for a harder one.

During the 3-back memory test, the electrodes delivered transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to a region of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to randomly chosen volunteers, who were unaware they were receiving it.

Other studies have shown the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in we make. “Our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex helps us to work hard,” says Xia.

The volunteers who had tDCS reacted faster and more accurately than those who didn’t receive this stimulation. For instance, their average reaction time was 0.98 seconds, compared with 1.12 seconds with sham stimulation.

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Xia thinks stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex will boost brain performance generally. “I can imagine any cognitive task will be better, but afterwards you will feel more fatigued,” she says.

After the tests, the volunteers who got tDCS had higher levels of the neurotransmitter glutamate in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, according to a non-invasive technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The higher their glutamate levels, the more likely they were to choose the €1 task over the €2 one.

Some researchers think mental fatigue is a result of the buildup of glutamate, which can harm cells at high levels. Xia thinks her team’s findings are the strongest evidence of this yet. The findings suggest it is important to take a break when you feel mentally tired, she says.

Xia thinks future studies should also look at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in people with conditions such as depression, which can affect motivation.

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“I think the claim that the stimulation made people ‘work harder’ is well substantiated,” says neuroscientist Emile Radyte at Samphire Neuroscience, a UK-based company exploring the use of tDCS to treat conditions such as premenstrual syndrome. But the study doesn’t prove that higher glutamate levels were the cause of the greater mental fatigue, she says.

Radyte says her trials have shown that if productivity is hindered by conditions such as premenstrual syndrome, applying tDCS over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can restore it. But she isn’t sure about using it to boost mental performance. “A 20-minute laboratory task does not establish a net productivity benefit over a working day,” says Radyte.

It is a good study, says at University College London, but the greater mental fatigue could be a result of using more neural energy, rather than the buildup of glutamate. It’s also hard to precisely target the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with tDCS without an MRI scanner to guide you, says Lavie. “Drink coffee instead,” she says.

A nondescript 115-million-year-old fragment of leg bone has yielded spectacularly preserved red blood cells, which may be the earliest ever found in dinosaurs.

Red blood cells have previously been found in dinosaur remains, including 75-million-year-old bone fragments collected in Canada in 2015 and the femur of a Tyrannosaurus rex that died 68 million years ago, found in Montana in 2005.

Now, at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and her colleagues say they have isolated the oldest-ever dinosaur red blood cells from the hind-limb of a theropod dinosaur, Aratasaurus museunacionali, found in Brazil in 2008.

The Aratasaurus individual studied by the team wasn’t yet fully grown, with an estimated body length of just over 3 metres, and weighed about 34 kilograms.

“The fossils we worked on are not display specimens by any means, so they don’t look very interesting,” says Grice. “If you look at them, you think there’s just a bunch of bones and there’s probably not much in there.”

Grice cut thin sections of bone, mounted them onto glass slides and used hydrochloric acid to remove surrounding rock – and she was shocked at what she saw.

“I was jumping up and down,” says Grice. “I ran up to my head of school’s office and was so excited that he gave me a whisky to calm me down. No one has ever seen dinosaur red blood cells in high resolution before.”

The cells she found were abundant: in a single slide, just a fifth of a millimetre wide, there were 20 blood cells. All of the cells were within fossilised blood vessels, providing further evidence that they really were red blood cells.

Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry analysis revealed the presence of haem B, a constituent of haemoglobin that binds to oxygen, adding molecular evidence of the type of cell.

The team also had to rule out the possibility of any contamination, especially from the sediments in which the fossil was preserved, which were dominated by algae.

The cells found outside the bone were dominated by chlorophyll-derived compounds, whereas those inside contained haem-derived molecules, which strongly suggests that the latter cells weren’t a result of contamination.

The researchers also compared the blood cells to those of the closest living relatives of the dinosaur fossil, birds and crocodiles. The Aratasaurus red blood cells are significantly larger. This could indicate that the cells swelled during fossilisation, or that the species grew much bigger than the fossilised specimen.

at the Natural History Museum in London says previous studies reporting red blood cells in fossils tens of millions of years old are contentious, with some researchers suggesting they could be the result of bacteria or artefacts of the fossilisation process. “This paper is further evidence that fossilised soft tissues such as red blood cells can preserve over geological timescales,” she says.

Grice says the discovery may mean that other nondescript dinosaur fossils that have been locked away in museum collections may hold profound secrets. “There’s drawers and drawers of fossil material, which don’t look very nice,” she says. “This kind of work opens up a whole new opportunity to unlock those collections and bring modern technology and molecular techniques to these specimens.”

The Mediterranean beachside haven of Antalya in Turkey is more used to hosting well-fed tourists than stressed climate negotiators. But for two weeks starting on 9 November, the city will become the climate change capital of the world, welcoming tens of thousands of delegates to the UN COP31 summit.

COP31 is the latest instalment of the annual climate summits where countries come together with the aim of tackling climate change. The meetings were responsible for ushering in the Paris Agreement in 2015, the climate treaty under which nations have promised to hold warming to “well below” 2°C and as close to 1.5°C as possible.

But in recent years, the summits have had a less impressive track record. Critics argue the meetings are no longer fit for purpose, undermined by the need for unanimous consensus in all decisions and struggling to find direction now that the work of agreeing a legal climate treaty is completed.

Delegates left last year’s COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, having agreed the bare minimum – that they remain united behind the Paris Agreement. But after a fortnight of tortuous negotiations, they were unable to agree on fresh commitments to move away from fossil fuel use or end deforestation.

And although the world is now on course for lower levels of warming than looked likely before the Paris Agreement was struck, global emissions are still not falling and the world is on track for 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century – nowhere near the goals laid out under Paris.

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So can this upcoming summit, COP31, change the game?

This year’s brutal weather should provide plenty of motivation. From devastating glacier collapses to severe heatwaves and raging wildfires, there has been no shortage of reminders that planet Earth is teetering on the brink of crisis. And that all came ahead of a super-sized El Niño now under way in the Pacific, a timely demonstration of what warming beyond 1.5°C will feel like in the real world – hot and dangerous, in short.

But don’t expect fireworks from this COP. So far, the mood music from the hosts – a joint gig between Turkey and Australia – is setting the tone for a business-as-usual summit.

Hangovers from Belém

As with recent summits, there’s no big declaration or new treaty pegged for Antalya. Instead, the main task negotiators face will be to grapple with a series of hangover decisions from Belém.

At COP30, countries agreed to create a “just transition mechanism”, which has alternatively been described as a “platform”, a “hub” and a “work programme”. The idea is to provide a support structure for those affected by the shift to a cleaner economy. For example, countries need to work out how best to support and retrain workers in the fossil fuel economy as energy grids transition to cleaner fuels. But the process of identifying how this just transition mechanism will work in practice has barely begun.

Nations also agreed to triple adaptation finance for lower-income countries – in short, helping them cope with the impacts of climate change – by 2035. But the commitment was vague, with no baseline year and no agreement on who should contribute or what types of finance would count. Delegates in Antalya will continue to hammer out the details.

“These are all big, kind of chunky areas where you know there will be strong expectation from developing countries and civil society that there is progress made,” says at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK climate and energy think tank.

Road map to nowhere?

One of the biggest disappointments from COP30 was that countries failed to commit to developing “road maps” away from fossil fuels. This would involve drawing up plans for moving their economies away from oil, gas and coal use. Although the idea had backing from more than 80 nations in Brazil, the final text from the summit failed to mention fossil fuels at all.

Countries that still backed the idea gathered in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April this year and jointly promised to draw up transition plans. However, to date, only France has produced anything like a fully fledged road map away from fossil fuels. Some countries are expected to announce their road maps on the sidelines of COP31, but it is unclear whether any major fossil fuel economies will come forward.

And despite a global oil crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that makes the case for clean energy ever more obvious, it is unlikely the road map idea will make it into the formal COP agenda this year.

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Instead, the summit’s hosts are pushing electrification as a route away from fossil fuels. The more you can electrify cars, home heating and the like, the faster the clean transition, the thinking goes. Turkey has launched a new “electrification target” that would see countries commit to electrifying 35 per cent of their annual energy consumption by 2035, up from the current rate of about 23 per cent.

We don’t yet know whether this would be a voluntary pledge countries would sign up to, or something that the hosts will push to be universally agreed under the main negotiations. Questions also remain over whether the target will include any directive for countries to decarbonise their power grids. Turkey and Australia “are talking about electrification in isolation, [and] rarely talking about electrification linked to ramping up renewables and decarbonising”, says Redmond-King.

Geopolitical headaches

Meanwhile, there are some serious headwinds facing the summit. In the face of rising fuel prices triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war and the US-Iran conflict, wealthy nations are tightening their belts. International aid has been cut significantly from many national budgets, including in the UK, where spending is set to fall by £6.5 billion to a historical low in 2027/2028. That leaves less money for funding climate action in lower-income countries, who in turn say they can’t take action to cut emissions without more cash. Arguments over funding risk souring the atmosphere of the summit.

Then there’s the awkward issue of the hosts. Both Turkey and Australia wanted to host COP31 and neither would back down, so the UN awarded them joint hosting responsibilities. Turkey is responsible for the location and logistics, as well as the so-called Action Agenda, which includes the pledges, commitments and announcements outside of the negotiations. Australia, meanwhile, will run the formal talks. But running a successful COP is a major challenge even for one country. With two countries in charge, there’s a real risk of things drifting into confusion and infighting. Questions over their commitment to the cause linger over both countries, who have each been slow to embrace the energy transition and still rely heavily on fossil fuels.

But there are a few spots of hope too. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a historic fourth term as president last month, defying expectations to beat right-wing populist candidate Flávio Bolsonaro. Lula’s victory means Brazil’s delegation will be in Turkey pushing for more progress on deforestation and fossil fuel transition road maps.

Meanwhile, Democrats may take control of the US Congress in midterm elections on 3 November, just before COP31 kicks off. A win for the Democrats in both houses could lead to renewed incentives for clean energy development and electric vehicles.

The US withdrew from both the Paris Agreement and the UN climate convention after Donald Trump took office in 2025, a move that has substantially worsened warming projections for 2100. Any sense that the US is returning to climate action will bolster morale among delegates.

What’s the headline?

In the formal negotiations track, there will be further talks on how the different “implementation” programmes on cutting emissions and ensuring a fair transition will work in practice. But these are unlikely to produce any big headlines.

“What we are going to see… in Antalya are many very important discussions, but they are less grand, big decisions,” , executive director of COP30, told journalists on a briefing call on 22 October.

A cover decision, which can summarise key decisions or include new pledges, could offer the opportunity for nations to present a new headline-grabbing commitment. Australia and Turkey have said ahead of the summit that they will work on developing a cover text, which could acknowledge the inevitability that the world will overshoot 1.5°C of warming and call on countries to go faster on cutting emissions.

Negotiations over the wording of the cover decisions often provide the dramatic finale for a COP summit. But it can become a trap for ministers running the event, says , a highly experienced climate negotiator who has led both the French and European Union delegations at COPs.

Ministerial teams come into a COP thinking, “how do I get a result that doesn’t look dreadful?” says Watkinson. “Particularly the ministers in charge; they want to get a boost to their career, and the country wants to say it’s done something important for the world.” It means COPs often end up “focused on yet another decision where we change the adverb”, he says.

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Watkinson wants to see COP summits focus much less on headlines generated by cover texts, and more on the backroom work to get countries to collaborate and communicate with each other. “If we seek the big decision each year, we’re using a huge amount of energy to get it, and we’re not focusing on the real challenge, which is how do we overcome the barriers that are holding us back,” he says.

That might mean changing the process to focus less on a consensus outcome with all parties, with action instead delivered by smaller groups of willing participants who work together to concentrate on delivering emissions cuts, he says.

It looks likely that the Antalya summit, despite its postcard-worthy setting, will be an unglamourous mix of long nights and bitter quarrels, reluctant compromises and underwhelming outcomes.

But for meeting insiders, the hope is that change will come in time for COP33 in two years’ time, when countries are due to conclude a global assessment of their progress to decarbonisation. The pressure will be even greater on that COP to deliver a meaningful response to the stocktake’s findings. The question is, can these summits reinvent themselves in time? As Watkinson puts it: “Practically everybody I speak to says, of course, we need to change it. We can’t carry on as we do.”