Recent repairs to a centuries-old tile floor at a church in the Netherlands may have revealed the skeleton of the French Musketeer d’Artagnan.

Today, Charles de Batz de Castlemore, Count d'Artagnan, is best known as a character in The Three Musketeers , written by Alexandre Dumas and eventually played by both Gene Kelly and future Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy —but he was a real French military officer and spy. D’Artagnan died during a siege, and the whereabouts of his body have remained a mystery for more than 350 years. But an archaeologist in the Netherlands recently unearthed a skeleton from the floor of a 17th-century church that could actually be d’Artagnan.

“ It is only the dead who do not return”

The ground beneath the centuries-old Saints Peter and Paul Church subsided earlier this year, cracking a few of the blue tiles that pave the chapel’s floor. During repairs, church staff decided to have a look beneath the floor to see if there was any truth to the rumor that d’Artagnan—famous French Musketeer and inspiration for a series of swashbuckling novels—lay buried beneath their church. It turns out that there actually was a skeleton buried under the church floor, and there’s a decent chance it’s d’Artagnan himself.

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The Coming of Age, a new exhibition about ageing, features the sake cup for centenarians in Japan, Darwin’s skull-tipped walking stick and Sam Taylor-Wood’s decaying still life

The first object visitors to the Wellcome Collection’s forthcoming exhibit, The Coming of Age, will encounter is a pure silver sake cup. In 1963, Japan’s government began a tradition of issuing these honorary gifts, or sakazuki , to citizens who lived to see in the morning of their 100th birthday . A total of 153 people received one in the first year.

By 2009, such was the growing number of centenarians that a decision was taken to reduce its size in an attempt to curtail costs. It wasn’t enough. Since the mid-2010s, the tens of thousands of Japanese elders who arrive at the increasingly common milestone now have had to make do with a cheaper nickel-silver alloy version instead. Still, as exhibition curator Shamita Sharmacharja suggests, “it’s better than a letter from the king!”

Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early . Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer.

Where I live in Boise, Idaho, temperatures hit the low 80s Fahrenheit (high-20s Celsius) in mid-March. The same heat dome sent temperatures soaring to 105° F (40° C) in Phoenix.

Ordinarily, water managers and hydrologists like me who study the Western US expect the mountain snowpacks to be at their fullest around April 1 . Snowpacks are natural reservoirs of water that farms and communities depend on through the hot, dry summer. Their snow water equivalent , meaning the amount of liquid water in the snowpack, is seen as a bellwether for water supplies.

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Exclusive: Paul Marshall also challenged over his own ‘misleading’ statements and £1.8bn of fossil fuel investments in his hedge fund

The co-owner of GB News and “committed” Christian Sir Paul Marshall has been criticised by a group of church leaders over the TV channel’s attacks on climate science and action.

The hedge fund manager was also challenged over his own statements, which were called “misleading”, by the 100-strong group, which includes the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and two current bishops.

One minute, Dennis Biesma was playing with a chatbot; the next, he was convinced his sentient friend would make him a fortune. He’s just one of many people who lost control after an AI encounter

Towards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. “I had some time, so I thought: let’s have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about,” he says. “Very quickly, I became fascinated.”

Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself.

Championed by a former chief medical officer, Lifeline is both a musical following Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the first antibiotic and a warning about the threat of superbugs in the present day

The floor of the United Nations is rarely handed over to musicians; when it is, it’s to global superstars such as Abba, Beyoncé and K-pop band BTS. So why, then, has a foot-stomping, folk-infused Scottish musical been added to the list of performances so influential they’ve gone on to fill the halls of New York’s General Assembly Building?

The subject of Lifeline, an energetic, imaginative stage account of the life of the father of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, with a modern love story and a Greek chorus of real scientists, provides a clue. This unlikely show tells the story of one of medicine’s most pressing crises: antimicrobial resistance and the deadly global threat of drug-resistant infections or superbugs.

A box the size of a filing cabinet was lifted by crane, slowly moved and placed very carefully in the back of an unassuming lorry earlier this week. What looked like a casual drive around the Cern campus was actually a world-first experiment in transporting antimatter, the most expensive and volatile substance on Earth. To find out why scientists wanted to achieve this milestone, and what happened on the journey, Madeleine Finlay hears from the Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample, and the Cern physicist Dr Christian Smorra.

Please drive carefully: scientists plan to transport volatile antimatter for first time

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For as long as we've known that soil bacteria manufacture molecular weapons to fight each other, we've been swiping their battle plans. In clinics and hospitals, those turf-war weapons have become miraculous drugs of modern medicine—antibiotics—that blow away otherwise deadly infections.

But, of course, there's a dark side of mimicking microbial munitions—bacteria have defenses, too, namely antibiotic resistance. You're probably aware that we're facing a rising threat of drug resistance among disease-causing bacteria, one that is rendering much of our stolen weaponry obsolete and making infections harder to defeat.

Often, this growing crisis is framed as a clinical failure: We're overusing and misusing antibiotics, hastening our bacterial foes' natural ability to develop and spread resistance. While this is certainly true, a new study in Nature Microbiology this week identifies a potentially new driver of rising antibiotic resistance—and we're at least partly to blame for this one, too.

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PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is generally not a high-profile group. It tends to be noticed when things go wrong, such as when the PCAST head named by Biden had to resign due to abusive behavior. Biden, who was generally supportive of science, didn't even name the members of PCAST until eight months after his inauguration. So it's no surprise that an administration that's been hostile to science took even longer to staff its version of the group.

The list of appointees was finally released on Wednesday , and it's notable for its almost complete absence of scientists. There are still nine unfilled vacancies on the council, so it's possible more scientists will be named later. But for now, PCAST is heavily tilted toward extremely wealthy technology figures.

These include investor Marc Andreessen, Google's Sergey Brin, Michael Dell of Dell, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Lisa Su of AMD, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. But many of the lesser known names have similar backgrounds. Previously named chairs of PCAST are investor David Sacks and a former investment company CFO and current head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Kratsios. Of the new appointees, Safra Catz also comes from Oracle, Fred Ehrsam co-founded Coinbase, and David Friedberg is another investor.

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