Last year saw a host of exciting galaxy-related discoveries, led by a study about a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud. What a time to be an astrophysicist, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein | Continue reading
Feedback continues investigating both the whereabouts and the usefulness of black holes, in the process uncovering new research suggesting the cosmic phenomena could be used as rechargeable batteries | Continue reading
From Australia to the UK, the global shortage of science teachers will have a damaging effect on diversity and equity in science, says physics teacher Alom Shaha | Continue reading
With a spate of missions to the lunar surface scheduled for this year, we must ensure lessons from the way humanity has impacted Earth aren’t forgotten | Continue reading
After discovering that a Ralph Rowlett was in charge of the Royal Mint in 1540, Peter Rowlett runs the genealogy calculations to find out if he could be related | Continue reading
This year should bring rich gaming with Star Wars Outlaws, wonderful surprises such as World of Goo 2 – a satirical physics puzzle game – and, hopefully, the much-delayed Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, says Jacob Aron | Continue reading
Søren Solkær's new collection of photographs shows starlings swooping as one in dramatic, cloud-like flocks | Continue reading
The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week | Continue reading
Intriguing facts and forgotten history mingle in what is essentially Rebecca Boyle's love letter to the moon | Continue reading
Hannah Ritchie's smart new book is sure to whip up major controversy by arguing that the data shows we can win the battle to save the planet. But are its solutions credible? | Continue reading
An invasion of nomadic herders from the Eurasian steppe profoundly changed the genetic landscape of modern Europe, influencing patterns of modern diseases | Continue reading
The mysterious giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki died out up to 295,000 years ago, after failing to adapt to a changing climate and the food variability that went with it | Continue reading
Manatees or sea cows usually inhabit coastal waters, but rumour has it that some are hiding out in Upper Guinea. A scientific expedition goes in search of them | Continue reading
People who live along rivers in the Amazon basin have severe neurological symptoms and dangerously high levels of mercury in their bodies because of pollution from gold mining | Continue reading
The experimental X-59 aircraft is designed to break the sound barrier without making the startling booms produced by current supersonic planes | Continue reading
Water pipes offer a largely untapped source of renewable electricity that could provide 1.4 gigawatts of power in the US alone | Continue reading
The mental health of people who undertake mindfulness or meditation courses offered by their employer is generally no better than those who are not offered such programmes | Continue reading
After a rocket uses up its fuel, the tank generally just becomes dead weight, but a prototype rocket that burns its own fuselage as propellant could solve that problem | Continue reading
NASA’s Artemis II and Artemis III missions to the moon have been delayed by a year after a series of problems with the spacecraft were revealed during testing | Continue reading
The Hubble Space Telescope has pinpointed the origin of the most distant known fast radio burst, which hit our planet in 2022 | Continue reading
Fire ants link together to form rafts when their nests are flooded, and unlike most materials the rafts don’t become thinner when they are stretched | Continue reading
A moray eel, a robber fly and an ice-topped slime mould appear in winning images from the Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition | Continue reading
Researchers used AI to design a new material that they used to build a working battery – it requires up to 70 percent less lithium than some competing designs. | Continue reading
We have known for decades that the Mediterranean diet lowers the risk of heart attack and other conditions – now we are starting to understand how certain components of the diet work their magic | Continue reading
Measuring “entanglement islands” that contain copies of information that black holes have lost could help us find an answer to Stephen Hawking’s black hole paradox | Continue reading
Several moon missions are planned for 2024, including some that will attempt to mine for ice on the moon and test out new lunar rovers – and they can teach us about Earth’s history | Continue reading
The global average temperature for 2023 was 1.48°C warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, putting the world on the brink of the Paris Agreement limit | Continue reading
The closest star cluster to the centre of the Milky Way we have seen seems to be falling in, which could teach us about how shredded clusters have helped make the galactic centre so dense | Continue reading
It may be easier than researchers thought to form diamonds inside giant planets, which means that it might rain diamonds on up to a third of the planets we have discovered so far | Continue reading
After its 8 January launch aboard a Vulcan rocket, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander has experienced a fuel leak that may leave it without enough propellant to land on the moon | Continue reading
Grasslands are almost 40 per cent less productive after a year of extreme drought, an experiment spanning six continents suggests | Continue reading
Own brand one-litre water bottles from three unnamed US supermarkets each contained hundreds of thousands of microscopic plastic particles | Continue reading
A Finnish start-up has developed a method of grinding up chicken or fish bones into a nutritious paste to make meat production more efficient. New Scientist conducted a taste test with mixed results | Continue reading
It may be easier than researchers thought to form diamonds inside giant planets, which means that it might rain diamonds on up to a third of the planets we’ve discovered so far | Continue reading
Bitcoin miners seem unwilling to take action to curb the cryptocurrency's energy and water use – so some campaigners argue that it is time for governments to intervene | Continue reading
Christina Koch, who will become the first woman to go to the moon with the Artemis II mission, on what space smells like, why it is difficult to return to Earth and how astronauts play human bowling | Continue reading
NASA has launched a robotic lander towards the moon in its first mission to the lunar surface since the Apollo programme | Continue reading
The United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket is scheduled to launch for the first time on 8 January, carrying the Peregrine lander to the lunar surface | Continue reading
An artificial skin that delivers a waterproof sense of touch could speed up underwater robotic exploration and ocean clean-up operations while reducing harm to marine life | Continue reading
An artificial intelligence model has unpicked some of the linguistic influences behind England's place names, which could help us to understand their meaning | Continue reading
Naomi Alderman on the tech billionaires at the heart of her new novel The Future, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club – and the 1974 book that inspired her | Continue reading
In this tantalising extract from Naomi Alderman's new novel The Future, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club, a tech chief executive discovers the end of the world is nigh | Continue reading
Military veterans with traumatic brain injury saw drastic reductions in depression and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after using the psychedelic drug ibogaine | Continue reading
Knot theory is linked to many other branches of science, including those that tell us about the cosmos | Continue reading
An analysis of photos taken by Voyager 2 in the 1980s shows that Neptune and Uranus have a similar pale blue hue as perceived by the human eye | Continue reading
Venus spins in the opposite direction to the other planets, which may have been caused by an ancient moon that orbited the planet backwards and then fell to the surface | Continue reading
An unusual material that consists of a complex jumble of intricately entwined tubes isn't much use on its own – but the technique needed to build it could be | Continue reading
Researchers have created a functional semiconductor from graphene for the first time, creating the possibility of computer chips with greater performance and efficiency | Continue reading