See the world of Stonehenge from your sofa this solstice

The original exhibition ran at the British Museum in 2022

University of Reading

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A new free online experience allowing anyone in the world to step inside the world of Stonehenge exhibition and explore thousands of years of history launches today (Sunday, 21 June). 

The Virtual World of Stonehenge, developed by researchers at the University of Reading and the British Museum, gives users an immersive digital tour of one of the most celebrated museum exhibitions in recent years. The original World of Stonehenge exhibition ran at the British Museum in 2022, attracting more than 190,000 visitors and bringing together over 400 objects from 36 institutions across Europe. 

Timed to release alongside the summer solstice, the new virtual version goes well beyond a simple recreation of the gallery. Users can go inside Stonehenge itself and watch it change through time, explore Neolithic flint mines at Grimes Graves, and discover rarely seen prehistoric objects through animation, soundscapes and interactive content. The experience is free to access via the British Museum website and works on desktop computers, tablets and phones. 

Professor Duncan Garrow, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading, said: "The original exhibition brought together an extraordinary collection of prehistoric objects, many of which had never been displayed together before. Now anyone, anywhere they are, can not only see those objects but understand the world of Stonehenge and experience how it looked and felt thousands of years ago. We hope it brings prehistoric Britain to life in a completely new way." 

Dr Neil Wilkin, at the British Museum, said: “This has been an amazing opportunity to think about the future of virtual museum exhibitions, not just at the British Museum but everywhere across the world”.  

Laser-scanning leaves, bracelets and crumbs 

The project was funded by UK Research and Innovation and builds on AHRC-funded research led by British Museum curator Dr Neil Wilkin, in partnership with Professor Duncan Garrow at the University of Reading. The team worked with the University of Southampton and digital heritage specialists ArtasMedia to transform a 3D laser scan of the original gallery, captured during the final weeks of the exhibition in 2022, into a fully interactive online experience. 

A particular focus of the project was making the stories behind lesser-known prehistoric objects more accessible. These include a 6,000-year-old elm leaf, a woven cow-hair bracelet, and the remains of a prehistoric feast, all of which are brought to life through new digital content developed specifically for the virtual exhibition. 

The launch coincides with the summer solstice, the moment when Stonehenge's alignment with the rising sun has drawn people to the site for thousands of years. 

The Virtual World of Stonehenge is free to access from Sunday 21 June: The World of Stonehenge: University of Reading and British Museum

FOR REPORTERS, USE CLOUD TOUR BEFORE 21 JUNE

 

New battery management system makes electric car batteries safer and more durable

In the EU project Nemo, a research team involving TU Graz has developed new models that make battery management systems significantly more intelligent. They detect damage at an early stage and increase the service life of electric car batteries

Graz University of Technology

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Electric car batteries can be monitored much more effectively whilst in use thanks to the upgraded battery management system.

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Credit: VSI - TU Graz

Just as an orchestra needs a conductor, a battery management system (BMS) controls the power storage of an electric vehicle. However, up to now the monitoring is only based on the voltages, currents and temperatures of the individual battery cells. Their ageing or possible damage can only be checked externally using complex calculations. In the EU project Nemo, Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and partners from industry have developed intelligent models and algorithms that enable the safety, service life and performance of batteries to be monitored directly in the vehicle’s system.

Avoiding dangers

“The battery management system is an important tool for operating electric vehicles more safely and sustainably,” says Christoph Drießen from the Vehicle Safety Institute at TU Graz. “If we recognise faults and damage to individual battery cells at an early stage via the BMS, many dangers can be avoided. And thanks to the monitoring of the ageing process of each individual cell, their service life can also be extended substantially through intelligent control.”

The team at the Vehicle Safety Institute at TU Graz focused primarily on the safety aspects of the batteries. To this end, the researchers at the institute’s Battery Safety Center examined battery cells that were mechanically deformed, for example to simulate parking damage. They used this laboratory data to train models and algorithms they had developed themselves so that the BMS can recognise damage independently and indicate when maintenance is required. In order to obtain the necessary data from inside the cell, the team is using new sensor technology known as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), which measures the electrical resistance inside the cells in the vehicle.

Internal findings on ageing

In addition, the Graz researchers developed a model that predicts the change in physical volume of the cells during charging and discharging. As excessive expansion increases the mechanical pressure in the battery pack and can lead to cracks and deformations, this model helps to minimise the risk of internal short circuits and thermal peaks.

The algorithms and models pertaining to service life and ageing were developed at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Their implementation in the BMS offers clear advantages over previous models or external checks. “Up to now, a test only showed how much the capacity has decreased compared to the original battery condition,” says Christoph Drießen. “But the new models also give us an insight into the changes within the cells as they age. This enables adjustments that are beneficial for performance, service life and safety.”

Demonstrator as a model for series production

Despite the numerous new functions, the enhanced BMS would not be significantly larger or heavier than before. For the additional EIS measurements, however, additional sensors and a correspondingly adapted integration into the BMS are required. 

In order to further demonstrate the developed technologies, a follow-up project will work on their continued development and transfer towards industrial application. A demonstrator at module level has already been set up for this in the current project.

The project was Co-funded by the European Union. Additional funding came from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation. In addition to TU Graz and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Infineon Technologies Austria, Ingenieurgesellschaft Auto und Verkehr (IAV) and the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique (CSEM) were on board as hardware and software providers as well as TTTech for the cloud implementation and ICONS as partners.

As part of the development of the battery management system, battery cells were subjected to a number of tests.

 

As part of the development of the battery management system, battery cells were subjected to a number of tests.

Credit

VSI - TU Graz

Journal

Journal of Power Sources

DOI

10.1016/j.jpowsour.2026.240029 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Development of a P2D-based model for battery swelling prediction under mechanical constraints

 

Cotton’s roots trace to Yucatan Peninsula, where wild gene pool runs deepest

Iowa State University

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Wild cotton, on left, has short, brown, and coarse fibers, while modern domesticated cotton has white, fine and abundant fibers. A new study led by Iowa State University scientists identified the northwestern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico as the original source of domesticated cotton.

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Credit: Corrinne Grover/Iowa State University

AMES, Iowa – There’s nothing like this in nature, Jonathan Wendel said as he showed a visitor in his Bessey Hall office the long white puffs billowing from a cotton boll – the protective flower capsule of the plant cultivated by humans for thousands of years. In the wild, cotton bolls are far smaller and hold darker, coarser and shorter fibers.

How did we get from there to here? Wendel, a distinguished professor of ecology, evolution and organismal biology at Iowa State University, has been asking that question for decades.

“This is my 40th year on faculty, and I came here with this project in mind. And it took 40 years to develop the resources, tools and technologies to solve the problem,” he said.

Wendel and a team of 19 co-authors outlined an answer in a paper published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showing that newly collected wild plant samples and advanced analysis of genomic sequencing data confirm modern cotton was domesticated from a diverse population native to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Tracing the lineage of cotton gives scientists a better understanding of how plants evolve. But given the plant’s significance as a crop – cotton remains the most common source of natural textiles, by far – there are also direct practical benefits. Knowing where cotton came from is a genetic treasure map, pointing where to look for valuable traits such as disease resistance or salt tolerance that were lost along the way as farmers bred for other qualities.

“When humans domesticate a plant, you pick from a big population and everything else is left behind. Do that for 1,000 generations, and you have a very narrow genetic base,” Wendel said. “So we’re very interested in that wild genetic diversity. We want to know what’s still out there.”

Collections years in the making

Pinpointing modern cotton’s home in the Yucatan was not a surprise. Earlier studies by Wendel, a prominent expert in cotton genetics, used less precise methods to suggest the peninsula curling to the north in southeastern Mexico was a likely origin of the plant’s domestication – a process that began about 5,000 years ago.  

The advent of quick, affordable genome sequencing put a more definitive determination within reach, if Wendel and his colleagues could gather a wide enough sampling of wild specimens. He’s been collecting wild cotton his whole career, scouring herbarium shelves and Caribbean coastlines for variants.  

“If everything you're looking at has crazy new variation, you clearly haven't reached saturation. But if the next 10 things look like the last thing you picked and everything’s forming a nice tight cluster, well, why bother to keep doubling up?” Wendel said.

Cotton plants steadily gathered over the years were important contributions to the study, but systematic collection in known wild populations was the linchpin. Corrinne Grover, an Iowa State research scientist and assistant adjunct professor in ecology, evolution and organismal biology, led new specimen sequencing and analysis of the complex data.

“Our collaborators did an amazing job sampling across the Yucatan strategically, and once we had that sequencing data it was very clear that’s where it came from,” she said.

Researchers compared hundreds of cotton genomes in different ways to validate their findings, including quantifying the differences between individual genomes and mapping which are most similar. That analysis linked domestic cotton genomes most closely to the specimens from the northwest corner of Yucatan, Grover said.

“Essentially, we're building huge data-powered genealogies of these plants, just like you could with people,” Wendel said.

Mining old plants for new benefits

After cultivated cotton spread out of northwestern Yucatan, it went on to dominate the worldwide population, crowding out other varieties independently domesticated in South America, Africa and India. The species native to Mexico – Gossypium hirsutum, also called upland cotton – accounts for about 90% of cotton plants today, a takeover researchers say was based on gradual improvement as opposed to dramatic mutations.

The diversity left behind in the wild during thousands of years of selective human breeding is most concentrated in cotton’s ancestral home because domestication creates a genetic bottleneck, narrowing the gene pool in successive generations. The genomes of two random wild cotton plants from northwestern Yucatan have on average twice as many genetic differences as two random modern cultivars, researchers found.

“As it turns out, cultivated cotton was poured out of a very small genetic bottleneck,” Wendel said.

The benefits of that diversity are obvious when you walk through a greenhouse where both domestic and wild cotton are growing, Grover said. The shorter, more compact domestic plants have fluffier bolls, but their wild brethren are often in better health overall.

“We know there are genetic traits in wild populations that could be useful if we can figure out what they are and get them into domesticated cotton,” she said. “Now we have all this data from the Yucatan, and it’s ready to be mined.”

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2607107123 

Article Title

Genomic diversity and the domestication history of cotton Gossypium hirsutum

 

Legalizing cannabis increases use and addiction – unless it is tightly controlled

Major global analysis finds that removing criminal penalties for cannabis possession is not associated with increased levels of use, but when cannabis can be sold for profit, use, addiction and psychiatric hospital admissions rise.

University of Bath

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Removing criminal penalties for possessing cannabis for personal use, or introducing tightly controlled legalisation of cannabis, does not appear to increase levels of cannabis use.

However, the commercial sale of cannabis is linked to increased health risks, with large-scale for-profit markets – such as those seen in the US and Canada – resulting in more potent products and higher rates of addiction.

These findings are reported in a study published on Wednesday, June 17, in The Lancet Psychiatry led by experts in addiction and mental health at the University of Bath in the UK, together with an international team from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

Co-authors Professor Tom Freeman, and Dr Rachel Lees Thorne, both from the Department of Psychology at Bath, say their findings highlight the distinct effects of different policy approaches globally.

Evolving policies around the world

Cannabis policies are rapidly evolving worldwide. Today, they range from strict prohibition to fully commercialised legalisation. The new paper examines global changes in cannabis policy between 2000 and 2025, and how these are linked to changes in cannabis use, cannabis addiction and other psychiatric disorders.

In the UK, cannabis is a Class B controlled drug, with a maximum penalty for possession of up to five years in prison, an unlimited fine, or both. A 2025 report by the London Drugs Commission, commissioned by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, titled The Cannabis Conundrum: a way forward for London, proposed decriminalising possession of cannabis for recreational use.

Such a change could shift the focus from managing cannabis through criminal law enforcement to healthcare, and address the disproportionate level of cannabis policing found in black communities. The findings of this new global analysis indicated that when other countries had decriminalised cannabis, there was little evidence for changes in cannabis use.

Other countries have gone a step further by legalising cannabis. The first country in the world to do this was Uruguay, which today has a tightly controlled approach where adults can access a restricted range of cannabis products from pharmacies (with limits on their potency) as well as cannabis social clubs, or by growing cannabis themselves.

In Uruguay, along with other contexts in which cannabis legalisation is tightly controlled, there is little evidence of changes in cannabis use.

By contrast, in many US states and in Canada, cannabis is legally sold through well-established, for-profit markets, making cannabis widely available. In these commercialised legal markets, use of the drug has increased. Cannabis potency has also increased since the legalisation of commercial sales, along with rates of addiction among adults, characterised by people struggling to stop using the drug despite negative effects on daily life.

Professor Freeman said: “In a rapidly changing global cannabis policy landscape it is increasingly important to ask how policy will change, rather than if it will change at all. The type of policy change is critical.

“We found little evidence for changes in use after decriminalisation or tightly controlled legalisation. By contrast, in Canada and the US, policy changes have been more substantial through commercialised legalisation, which have increased sales and consumption.

“There are now more daily consumers of cannabis than daily consumers of alcohol in the US. What followed commercialised legalisation was a rise in cannabis addiction as well as increases in hospital admissions for psychosis, including cases where psychotic disorders occurred alongside cannabis addiction.

“The emergence of a for-profit cannabis industry can result in commercial interests being prioritised over public health – just as we have seen with the alcohol and tobacco industries. Increased availability of cannabis products, greater product strength and active marketing of these products can increase the risk of harm.

“Alternative policies – such as decriminalisation or strictly regulated legalisation – can remove the harms of criminalising people who use cannabis, while limiting changes in use.”

Medical cannabis

The researchers found that poorly regulated access to medical cannabis, particularly in the absence of clear evidence on its safety and effectiveness, may also increase the risk of harm to people’s health.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs is currently reviewing evidence on the impact of the UK’s 2018 legalisation of medical cannabis, including whether it has achieved its desired aims and whether there have been unintended consequences.

Professor Freeman said: “As global cannabis policies continue to evolve, we need to do more to track their impact – particularly in countries outside of the US and Canada, where fewer studies are conducted.”

The new review is part of a collection of papers on cannabis published in The Lancet Psychiatry and led by the University of Bath in collaboration with international partners.

Cannabis products and mental illness

The second review finds evidence that daily cannabis use can act with other risk factors to increase the risk of psychosis, but its role in depression, anxiety and risk of suicidal thoughts or suicide was less clear. 

The third paper synthesises evidence from clinical trials into the use of medical cannabinoids (the active ingredients in cannabis) for the treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Though there is a growing trend to prescribe these substances to treat mental health and substance use disorders, the researchers found little strong evidence of their effectiveness on the basis of the available evidence from clinical trials.

Across 54 trials, limited benefits were found: cannabinoids modestly reduced cannabis withdrawal and use, improved sleep in insomnia, and helped with tics and some autism traits. But they also increased cocaine craving in people with cocaine use disorder and showed no meaningful effect for anxiety, PTSD, psychosis or opioid dependence. There were no trials for the treatment of depression.

ENDS.

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Journal

The Lancet Psychiatry

DOI

10.1016/S2215-0366(26)00087-8 

Method of Research

Systematic review

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

International cannabis policies and their association with cannabis use, cannabis use disorder, and other psychiatric” disorders” published in The Lancet Psychiatry

Article Publication Date

17-Jun-2026

 

Scientists just found something weird inside moss

Tiny desert plants may have unexpected fungal roommates

University of California - Riverside

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​Moss collected at the Anza-Borrego Research Station. Tiny features help researchers identify the species. 

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Credit: Kian Kelly/UCR

Mosses are survivors. They can dry into what looks like green dust, only to spring back to life minutes after rain. They can grow on rocks, in deserts, and there’s talk of using them to terraform Mars someday. According to new research, mosses have also been hiding something.

UC Riverside researchers studying desert mosses have found evidence, presented in the journal New Phytologist, that these ancient plants may host fungi inside their tissues. This relationship has not previously been documented. 

If confirmed, the finding could rewrite what we know about moss biology and even offer clues about how plants first colonized land roughly 470 million years ago.

More than 85% of land plants partner with fungi that help plants pull nutrients from soil in exchange for sugars made through photosynthesis. Around three-quarters of plants team up with a well-known fungal group called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, or AMF. Mosses, however? For decades, scientists have believed all 10,000 species were loners.

“That’s been the model,” said Jason Stajich, a UCR professor of microbiology and plant pathology and co-author of the study. Mosses, he explained, simply didn’t need fungi.

Investigating the accuracy of this model, UCR doctoral researcher Kian Kelly visited scorching landscapes in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, where temperatures climb over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. There he found strange living communities called biological soil crusts that consist of fungi, bacteria, algae, mosses, and even microscopic animals.

“Sometimes I couldn’t find the same species of moss,” Kelly explained, describing long stretches of wandering through extreme heat trying to collect matching species in the desert and less arid climates for comparison purposes. The authors were curious whether differences in climate might cause differences in fungal communities found inside of the mosses. This could help predict the effects of climate change on mosses as aridity increases in drylands. 

Back in the lab, researchers ground up moss samples and searched for DNA from fungi living inside them. And they found it. In particular, they were surprised to find mycorrhizal fungi, which cannot survive without a plant partner. 

But the fungi inside desert moss was not the same as the fungi found inside moss grown in less harsh conditions.

"We suspect that certain fungi are more helpful for surviving hotter, drier climates," Kelly said.

The fungal species inside the mosses also did not match what the researchers found in the surrounding dirt. That suggested the fungi weren’t random contamination or freeloaders munching dead plant tissue. Instead, something more deliberate might be going on.

But DNA alone isn’t enough to prove fungi are actually living in a plant. So, Kelly turned to microscopy.
One night, after staining moss tissue with a blue dye that sticks specifically to fungi, he peered through a microscope and spotted branching fungal structures inside moss cells.

“As soon as I saw that, I knew we had something really interesting,” Kelly said.

The fungal structures looked a lot like arbuscules, which are tiny tree-shaped formations fungi normally build inside plant roots to swap nutrients. Except mosses don’t have roots. In this case, the structures appeared in moss leaves. The researchers call them “arbuscule-like” because they’re not quite the same as the textbook versions seen in other plants. Future studies will need to show whether nutrients are moving between mosses and fungi before anyone can officially call the relationship a true symbiosis.

Still, if the partnership turns out to be real, it could help scientists more fully understand the origins of life on this planet. Mosses are closely related to some of Earth’s earliest land plants, meaning this discovery might offer a glimpse into the kinds of alliances that helped life crawl out of ancient oceans and survive on dry land in the first place.

The findings may also open new avenues for the restoration of damaged landscapes. Many desert mosses are essential parts of soil crusts that are increasingly threatened by warming temperatures and human disturbances. A single footprint can take decades to heal. If fungi help mosses survive heat, drought, or climate stress, researchers think the relationship could someday inspire ways to boost struggling desert habitats.

For now, the discovery serves as a reminder that the smallest patches of life may hold big secrets.

“The desert,” Kelly said, “is full of things people overlook. Sometimes, the biggest surprises are the ones growing quietly beneath our feet.”

​

 

Photos show moss's ability to spring back to life with exposure to moisture. Same species on both sides. 

Credit

Kian Kelly/UCR

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Journal

New Phytologist

DOI

10.1111/nph.71211 

Article Title

Novel Glomeromycotina–moss associations identified in California dryland biocrusts