Joshua Paul Dale's excellent book makes a great case for studying cuteness, from baby animals to Hello Kitty. But the concept may have a very dark side | Continue reading
Coal waste separation might sound deathly dull, but the waste from abandoned coal mines might be where we can find some of the rare elements needed for clean energy tech, discovers Graham Lawton | Continue reading
Potassium and rubidium atoms aboard the International Space Station have been cooled almost to absolute zero to put a fundamental principle of Einstein’s general theory of relativity to the ultimate test | Continue reading
The James Webb Space Telescope has let us peer into the atmosphere of gas giant planet WASP-107b, and it has clouds made of sand and an atmosphere of sulphur dioxide and water vapour | Continue reading
A blow to the head may suppress the brain's waste disposal system, leading to a dangerous build-up of fluid. Now, a study in mice suggests a drug cocktail can get the system working again | Continue reading
The ability to 3D print using bendy and rigid materials at the same time could open up new possibilities for robotics | Continue reading
We used to trace the origins of art to Stone Age Europe. Now we have evidence of artistic sensibility in earlier hominins, from Neanderthals to Homo erectus and beyond | Continue reading
An exoskeleton that moves the wrists up and down and side to side could help people recover from injuries to the joints | Continue reading
The AI that powers ChatGPT could save doctors' time when responding to cancer-related queries, but also gives potentially harmful recommendations in around 7 per cent of cases | Continue reading
Comets may be a key source for the building blocks of life, but the only planetary systems where those ingredients could survive impact may be ones with large stars or lots of neighbouring worlds | Continue reading
Silky ants with a fungal infection favour food containing aphids, which are a source of hydrogen peroxide, and this increases their chances of survival | Continue reading
Snakelocks anemones are the first known “heliotropic” animals – their tentacles point towards the sun, tracking its movements like plants do | Continue reading
Covid-19 rebound, when the virus increases in the body after initially decreasing, affected just under 21 per cent of people after they took Paxlovid in a trial, compared with fewer than 2 per cent not on the treatment | Continue reading
Companies are now offering chatbots that appear to come from beyond the veil. But psychologists say this "grief tech" may interfere with the patterns of brain activity through which we adapt to loss | Continue reading
A 15-kilometre-long mass of lava has formed underneath the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland and could erupt at any time | Continue reading
A 15-kilometre-long mass of lava has formed underneath the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland and could erupt at any time | Continue reading
By using artificial intelligence to spot patterns in weather data, Google DeepMind says it can beat existing weather forecasts up to 99.7 per cent of the time, but data issues mean the approach is limited for now | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence can work out what someone is privately typing in VR meetings in Meta Horizon Workrooms by looking at the way their avatar's hands move | Continue reading
A small trial of a cholesterol-lowering treatment based on CRISPR gene editing has produced promising results, but there are questions over safety | Continue reading
Understanding how the atmosphere responds to rising and falling carbon emissions is a complex business, and now researchers have found taking longer to reach net zero could see global warming continue afterwards | Continue reading
The tail of comet Erasmus swung back and forth during its closest approach to the sun, probably because of a cloud of plasma spat out during a solar storm | Continue reading
A chemistry robot analysed meteorite samples and tested a range of catalysts, demonstrating a possible approach for producing oxygen at a Martian colony | Continue reading
Men are living shorter lives than women in the US, a widening gap largely driven by deaths due to covid-19, drug and alcohol abuse and suicide | Continue reading
Simply allowing existing trees to grow to maturity could theoretically suck billions of tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere | Continue reading
We are finally working out what happens to the skin and gut microbiome when someone gets acne, giving us new targets for treatments | Continue reading
This chilling extract is from Sandra Newman's retelling of George Orwell's dystopian classic, 1984, the latest pick for our New Scientist Book Club. It takes place as Newman's protagonist Julia sets off for the Two Minutes Hate | Continue reading
The UK's Automated Vehicles Bill would make it a criminal offence for car-makers to use certain marketing terms unless their vehicles are fully self-driving, with a punishment of up to two years in prison and a fine | Continue reading
The latest set of heart disease results seen with using Wegovy to treat obesity could help swing medical opinion in its favour | Continue reading
Spraying a stretchy and conductive polymer onto any store-bought garment turns it into a sensor for monitoring body movement during physical therapy | Continue reading
Cannabis is more popular in North America than anywhere else and its use continues to grow – but, somewhat surprisingly, not among adolescents | Continue reading
It is widely assumed that Europe used to be covered by dense, unbroken forests, but ancient pollen shows half was grassland or light woodland | Continue reading
Divers often struggle to communicate because radio waves can’t travel far through water, but a way to send the waves up and across the surface before dropping back down again could change that | Continue reading
Favouring insiders over outsiders now fuels conflict, argues David R. Samson in his new book. His cure for modern tribalism - create small camps of trusted people, echoing our evolutionary past | Continue reading
The moon lacks the nutrients that plants need to grow, but adding three types of bacteria to a simulation of lunar soil enabled tobacco plants to flourish in lab experiments | Continue reading
Fusion reactors could be used to produce radioactive isotopes for hospitals way before they become useful power generators | Continue reading
An echidna named after David Attenborough that hadn't been seen by scientists in more than 60 years has been caught on camera for the first time | Continue reading
Altering the gut bacteria of both mice and people either induced or relieved the chronic pain condition fibromyalgia | Continue reading
With fewer than 150 left in the wild, the Malayan tiger is rarely seen – but images from camera traps provide hope that conservation efforts are paying off | Continue reading
A composite image made from two faces can fool humans and AI, but unusually smooth eyebrows, which are an effect of image morphing, provide a way to detect them | Continue reading
The quantum realm is full of strange effects, but there’s a reason why everything looks normal from our point of view, writes physicist Sebastian Deffner | Continue reading
People who socialise regularly with friends or family live longer than those who never do, according to a study in more than 450,000 people in the UK | Continue reading
The longest actors’ strike in Hollywood history ended with an agreement that requires studios to get consent and pay performers for using AI-created digital replicas – but AI could still drastically change the industry | Continue reading
High-speed cameras reveal that hummingbirds fly sideways to fit through narrow openings, or fold back their wings to shoot through like an arrow | Continue reading
The most distant supermassive black hole confirmed is more than 31 billion light years away, and it could be the key to figuring out how these behemoths grew so big so fast | Continue reading
Shaking a martini glass back and forth creates an intricate vortex pattern in the cocktail that takes on a different shape depending on the physical properties of the drink | Continue reading
An analysis of archive photographs shows that the retreat rate of hundreds of glaciers around the coast of Greenland has accelerated dramatically due to global warming | Continue reading
A toothpaste that contains peanut proteins did not cause any serious side effects in people with an allergy to the food and showed early signs of preventing dangerous reactions | Continue reading
Aaron James received the first ever eyeball transplant during a 21-hour-long surgical procedure – and five months later, his new eyeball is healthy | Continue reading