An alternative to BMI for diagnosing obesity could prevent misdiagnosis in millions of people worldwide, according to doctors who found it more accurately distinguished healthy people from those with harmful excess body fat. Guardian Science editor Ian Sample takes co-host Madeleine Finlay through why BMI is flawed, and how the new framework could improve precision medicine.
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europeanspaceagency posted a photo:
On 12 November 2026, the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission released its first major batch of data. The very large data release, named DR1-Foundation, captures the light of more than a billion objects and covers an area of sky as big as 9500 full Moons, laying the foundation for Euclid’s largest-ever 3D map of the cosmos.
The release contains the light (spectra) captured from more than 160 million sources. Euclid uses a technique known as spectroscopy to measure the light from galaxies and stars. In simplified terms, Euclid splits this light into rainbows by directing the light into a camera that works like a prism. The gases within a galaxy produce different markers at specific points in this rainbow; by studying these markers and their position in the spectra, scientists can explore which materials are present in the galaxy, and also measure its distance.
This concept is represented in this slider. The image on the left shows a patch of sky filled with stars and other cosmic objects. By sliding across, these point sources are transformed into stretched rainbows of light.
Specifically, Euclid hunts for the light from star-forming clouds of hydrogen gas in distant galaxies (light known as hydrogen-alpha). Euclid scientists will hunt for hydrogen-alpha within the DR1-Foundation spectra to measure the distances to galaxies and map the 3D structure of the cosmic web – the main goal of Euclid spectroscopy.
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[Image description: A slider compares the same densely populated patch of dark sky in two views. One shows thousands of tiny white, orange and bluish points and smudges, with several bright stars forming sharp spikes. The other transforms the objects into thin vertical streaks, many displaying rainbow-like bands of red, green, blue and violet.]
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by B. Granett; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
europeanspaceagency posted a photo:
On 12 November 2026, ESA’s Euclid space telescope released its first major batch of data: DR1-Foundation. This graphic provides an overview of the areas and images released.
The area of sky covered in this data release is shown in yellow on an all-sky map in the middle of this graphic. These observations were gathered over roughly one year, from spring 2024 to spring 2025. In that time the Euclid Wide Survey covered around 1900 deg2 of sky, corresponding to 9500 times the area of the full Moon as seen from Earth. On the top left, Euclid’s field-of-view in one observation is compared to the area of the full Moon (further explained here).
Two main sky patches are released as images: 367 deg2 of the northern sky and 148 deg2 of the southern sky. In the graphic, the locations of the various zoomed in images are also shown. Above the separate images, the zoom factor is given (from 3 to 106 times enlarged).
The data release comprises around 13 months of observations and marks the first major release of mission data since Euclid’s launch in mid-2023. It reveals unprecedented numbers of cosmic objects, including over 900 million galaxies, around 15 000 strong gravitational lensing candidates, over 60 million quasar candidates (the brilliant cores of distant galaxies), and the spectra from more than 160 million sources.
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[Image description: An infographic shows Euclid’s survey at several scales. At the centre, an oval all-sky view shows the Milky Way, with Euclid’s observed areas highlighted in yellow. Two enlarged survey regions cover 367 square degrees at upper left and 148 square degrees below. A small image of the full Moon provides a scale comparison. Coloured boxes and connecting lines lead to increasingly magnified views. These zooms reveal first large areas filled with stars and galaxies, then individual galaxies and dense groups of galaxies in greater detail. Labels indicate magnifications from ×3 to ×106.]
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
europeanspaceagency posted a photo:
On 12 November 2026, ESA’s Euclid space telescope released its first major batch of data: DR1-Foundation. As part of this very large data release, Euclid has captured the light of more than a billion objects over an area of sky as big as 9500 full Moons, laying the foundation for its largest-ever 3D map of the cosmos.
The new data release reveals unprecedented numbers of strong gravitational lenses, which form when the light travelling to us from distant galaxies is significantly distorted by a foreground galaxy. It contains the largest strong lens catalogue ever – bigger than all previous catalogues combined.
The catalogue includes rarer lens configurations that used to be one-off discoveries, such as compound lenses (where multiple background galaxies at different distances are lensed by the same foreground galaxy), and more unusual systems (such as lensing by spiral galaxies and lensed quasars – the brilliantly bright cores of distant galaxies).
Strong gravitational lensing is one of the few ways we can measure the mass of galaxies. The combined mass of different components in galaxies – stars, dark matter, supermassive black holes – distorts distant light as it travels across the Universe to us. Strong lenses allow us to study these individual components, uncover the nature of the dark matter haloes that galaxies sit within, and explore the expansion of the Universe. They also act as natural magnifying glasses, revealing ancient, distant galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to study.
This collage shows different types of lenses:
- First row (L-R): classic galaxy–galaxy lens, Einstein ring in a face-on spiral lens, inclined dusty disc lens galaxy
- Second row (L-R): edge-on dusty lens galaxy, lensed galaxy with visible star-forming regions, compound lens
- Third row (L-R): galaxy group lens, lensed quasar, galaxy group lens
Compound lenses are systems in which multiple background galaxies at different distances are lensed by the same foreground galaxy, producing multiple rings as a result. Disc galaxy lenses – either edge-on or face-on, with the latter being rarer to spot – are quite unusual, as they tend to be less massive than other types of galaxies. Galaxy group lenses produce striking loops and arcs on the sky due to their masses and complex morphologies. Lensed galaxies with visible star-forming regions are particularly interesting to scientists; they can help locate dark matter in the lens galaxy, while also enabling the study of the star formation itself in especially distant galaxies. Last but far from least, lensed quasars are some of the most scientifically valuable types of strong lens. As their brightness varies over time, multiple images of the same background galaxy can help us measure the expansion of the Universe. They are also sensitive probes of dark matter.
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[Image description: A collage of nine close-up views of gravitational lenses against black backgrounds. The upper six show mostly round or oval shapes with bright creamy-white or golden centres. Several have pale blue spiral patterns or rings, while others have smooth, hazy outer regions or dark brown bands. The lower three show golden-white shapes surrounded by striking blue arcs, curved streaks and partial rings.]
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by N. Lines and T. Li; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
europeanspaceagency posted a photo:
On 12 November 2026, the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission released its first major batch of data. The very large data release, named DR1-Foundation, captures the light of more than a billion objects and covers an area of sky as big as 9500 full Moons, laying the foundation for Euclid’s largest-ever 3D map of the cosmos.
The release contains the light (spectra) captured from more than 160 million sources. Euclid uses a technique known as spectroscopy to measure the light from galaxies and stars. In simplified terms, Euclid splits this light into rainbows by directing the light into a camera that works like a prism. The gases within a galaxy produce different markers at specific points in this rainbow; by studying these markers and their position in the spectra, scientists can explore which materials are present in the galaxy, and also measure its distance.
Specifically, Euclid hunts for the light from star-forming clouds of hydrogen gas in distant galaxies (light known as hydrogen-alpha). Euclid scientists will hunt for hydrogen-alpha within the DR1-Foundation spectra to measure the distances to galaxies and map the 3D structure of the cosmic web – the main goal of Euclid spectroscopy.
Read more
[Image description: A slider compares the same densely populated patch of dark sky in two views. One shows thousands of tiny white, orange and bluish points and smudges, with several bright stars forming sharp spikes. The other transforms the objects into thin vertical streaks, many displaying rainbow-like bands of red, green, blue and violet.]
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by B. Granett; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
europeanspaceagency posted a photo:
On 12 November 2026, ESA’s Euclid space telescope released its first major batch of data: DR1-Foundation. As part of this very large data release Euclid observed Abell 3128, a cluster of hundreds of galaxies lying around 800 million light-years away from us. Abell 3128 is one of the richest members of the Horologium supercluster of galaxies, which is itself made up of more than 30 smaller galaxy clusters.
Abell 3128 is home to a great many galactic residents, as captured here, including whirling spirals and fuzzy ellipticals. A wonderful celestial object can be seen directly at the image’s centre: a strong gravitational lens, where the light travelling to us from a more distant galaxy has been warped by a massive object in the foreground, creating beautiful blue arcs and stretched-out shapes on the sky.
This frame shows a fraction of not only Abell 3128 but another galaxy cluster named ACT-CL J0330-5227; while in reality the two clusters are separated by a huge distance of around 5 billion light-years, they overlap here in our line of sight.
The image – itself a close-up of a wider Euclid view of the Horologium supercluster (in which Abell 3128 is visible to the bottom-left) – took Euclid about 70 minutes to acquire and covers a sky area of 0.12 deg2 (just over half the size of the full Moon). It shows Euclid’s powers at maximum resolution.
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[Image description: A dense field of galaxies fills the dark sky. Two large, pale elliptical galaxies dominate the upper half, surrounded by hundreds of smaller galaxies in white, blue, pink and orange. Several bright foreground stars have prominent diffraction spikes. Spiral, oval and edge-on galaxies of many different sizes are scattered across the image.]
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Racing Bulls will retain their current pairing of Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad for the upcoming 2027 season.
The FreeBSD project's status team has published FreeBSD's third status report of 2026, showing plenty of ambitious work underway and a community still undecided on how to treat code from AI coding assistants. The FreeBSD Status Report Third Quarter 2026 is a substantial document, with 51 entries from five teams covering 16 projects, plus six other sections with more detailed reports. There are updates on the progress of the Sylve project, which is an attempt to bring a smooth polished GUI for managing FreeBSD virtualization hosts – something akin to Proxmox for FreeBSD. We mentioned this when we looked at the new Daemonarchy project last month. Another covers the new AppJail effort – a containerized app distribution system for FreeBSD, including for GUI apps, which aims for something broadly comparable to Snap, Flatpak and AppImage on Linux. In other words, interesting and quite radical stuff is happening in the FreeBSD space. What this particular LLM-skeptical vulture was most interested to see, though, was an update on the internal discussion about how to handle code generated by AI coding assistants in the project. We first reported on this vexed subject back in September 2025 and no final answer has yet been published. NetBSD banned AI-generated code in 2024 and although the bot-boosters say this will doom it to irrelevance, as we reported last month, the project is thriving. Also back in October, we looked at OpenBSD 8.0, whose launch materials are full of mockery for AI users. Under the FreeBSD Core Team section, there is a subsection headed "FreeBSD Developer AI survey." The survey was created by Baptiste Daroussin, and received 140 responses. Although the percentages show that there is some resistance to AI, there are hints here as to why it’s taking so long. Some project committers are against it, yet many more are proponents. Since there are only seven bullet points, we thought we would quote them in full: Policy: 88 percent want the Project to adopt a policy, either a formal, written policy (49 percent) or light guidance and best practices (39 percent). Six percent said that AI should be explicitly discouraged, and three percent that the existing contribution rules are sufficient. AI-assisted code: 35 percent said it must be disclosed, 25 percent that it must be reviewed more strictly than human code, 22 percent that it should be treated like any other contribution, and 16 percent that it should be rejected outright. Safeguards: mandatory human review (78 percent) and mandatory disclosure (69 percent) were requested most often, followed by provenance or licensing documentation (47 percent) and mandatory testing (39 percent). Disclosure: 84 percent want AI use disclosed, either always (48 percent) or when its involvement is significant (36 percent). 79 percent want AI-assisted commits marked in the commit log, and 56 percent prefer a tag that names the tool. Concerns: the main concerns about quality are correctness and subtle bugs (39 percent, licensing and provenance (26 percent), and maintainability (21 percent). 75 percent are somewhat or very concerned about copyright and licensing. Principles: accountability, meaning that a human remains responsible (91 percent), and transparency (78 percent) were selected most often, and preserving code quality was the top-ranked goal for a policy. Other uses: 65 percent would allow AI-generated documentation with human review. 54 percent would allow AI tools on Project infrastructure, most of them with restrictions, and 29 percent would not. Only six percent for explicit discouragement, 16 percent for outright rejection, and 35 percent against LLM-generated documentation. This plus the usual sort of calls for responsible use and disclosure, concerns about copyright issues, and so on. The Reg is strongly reminded of the Debian developer poll we reported on in August. This had no fewer than four slightly different AI-refusal options out of eight, and despite the Condorcet voting method it uses, the result was giving permission to use bots. With such relatively weak opposition, we suspect that FreeBSD will go the same way as Debian: tell developers to be careful, but allow bot usage, resulting in LLM-extruded code being committed into the project. ®
