The bones were shaped by people using stone tools before they were fossilised, adding new evidence for humans’ arrival in the Americas before the end of the Ice Age | Continue reading
Geologists hoping to declare a new epoch dominated by humanity’s influence on Earth have chosen Crawford Lake in Canada as the location where the start of the Anthropocene is defined | Continue reading
Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki's Inter-universal Teichmüller theory has attracted controversy since it was published in 2012, with no one able to agree whether it is true. Now, a $1 million prize is being launched to settle the matter | Continue reading
Magpies and crows have been seen making nests using spikes placed on buildings to deter birds from nesting | Continue reading
Instead of a uniform tax on carbon emissions, countries should apply higher taxes to luxury products to reduce social inequality and tackle climate change, say researchers | Continue reading
The lithium-ion batteries found in electric cars work best when kept within a certain temperature range, so researchers have created a blanket to keep your car cool in the sun and warm in the cold | Continue reading
Wegovy and Ozempic have made headlines, but a new wave of more effective drugs like Mounjaro have the potential to end obesity altogether. How will they work and are they safe? | Continue reading
Taking small amounts of the psychedelic substance LSD led to people sleeping for longer than when they took a placebo, but why this benefit only occurred the night after they microdosed is unclear | Continue reading
Most of the meteorites found on Earth come from asteroids, but a few come from other bodies like Mars and the moon. Now, researchers say they have discovered a new kind - a rock originally from Earth that went to space then came back | Continue reading
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is sending both flying and sailing drones into the eye of hurricanes to help improve storm forecasts | Continue reading
A gene-editing technique makes mosquitoes produce antibodies against the malaria parasite, which could mean cases in people are also slashed | Continue reading
Thanks to gene therapy, people who could previously only detect shades of grey can now distinguish red objects from a darker background | Continue reading
Our understanding of aromaticity, a concept that underpins life itself, has been thrown into chaos. But from the ashes have risen powerful new tools including supercharged solar cells and a Jekyll-and-Hyde material powered by "antiaromaticity" | Continue reading
Last year's summer was the hottest season ever recorded in Europe, and a new estimate shows there were over 61,000 heat-related excess deaths during this period | Continue reading
The discovery of low-level ripples throughout the universe called the gravitational wave background has set physicists looking for exotic explanations | Continue reading
This epic TV series kicks off with Inferno, the story of our planet’s biggest mass extinction. Host Chris Packham probes how Earth lost up to 90 per cent of its species in an event which began 252 million years ago | Continue reading
A block of granite on the far side of the moon used to be the inside of a volcano – though researchers are unsure how the volcano could have formed | Continue reading
Alec Luhn joins the UK’s new state-of-the-art polar research ship for trials in the North Sea ahead of its first scientific expedition to Antarctica | Continue reading
Due to fierce competition for mates, male spider mites guard juvenile females and forcibly remove their skin as they near adulthood so they can secure the first mating | Continue reading
A faster and more accurate method for putting footage of actors in different backgrounds allows directors to see how their shots will appear as they film them | Continue reading
Microfluidic chips have been made from water encased in nanoparticles and carved into precise shapes, and they could be used to carry out scientific tests on liquids and cells | Continue reading
The record for the hottest average global air temperature was broken three times this week, making the past seven days the hottest since instrumental records began in the 1850s | Continue reading
Retinal vein occlusion affects more than 16 million people worldwide and can eventually lead to blindness, but treating it is challenging due to the small size of the veins involved – and now a robot could help | Continue reading
This intriguing extract is taken from Pod by Laline Paull, a novel told from the perspective of a spinner dolphin which is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club | Continue reading
Jaguar attacks on pets and farm animals are a common problem, but after developing a drug-induced stomach ache, the big cats seem to learn not to kill certain animals | Continue reading
The author of the Women’s prize-shortlisted Pod reveals why she decided to write a story that initially felt too daunting – now the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club | Continue reading
Silicon-based solar cells have a theoretical efficiency limit of around 30 per cent, but adding a perovskite layer enables new designs to harvest more energy | Continue reading
As temperatures rise due to climate change, the huge amounts of corn grown in the US Midwest could be under threat, and it seems breeding for high-yielding varieties has made the crop genetically more vulnerable | Continue reading
Hundreds of groundwater springs have emerged at the base of retreating glaciers in Svalbard, and they may be adding significant amounts of methane to the atmosphere | Continue reading
Molecular evidence has revealed that a person buried with lavish goods over 4000 years ago was female, not male as previously thought | Continue reading
We know that genetic factors play the largest role in the risk of developing schizophrenia, but few of the genes involved have been identified. Now researchers have found relevant mutations that occur in embryos | Continue reading
People who are genetically more likely to be active in the morning have a lower risk of experiencing symptoms of depression than those who are in their element in the evenings | Continue reading
When given the chance to peck on symbols that carried different probabilities of getting food, carrion crows learned to choose the one with a higher probability of reward | Continue reading
Driverless cars can use lasers to sense objects, but reflected light from nearby vehicles or bright sunlight can interfere. A system using entangled photons could help the vehicles avoid obstacles | Continue reading
A large US study has found that being overweight but not obese carried a slightly lower risk of dying within the study period than being a supposedly healthy weight | Continue reading
Scent compounds released by your hands can be used to determine gender, which may be useful in figuring out information about crime scenes | Continue reading
Proofs, the central tenet of mathematics, occasionally have errors in them. Could computers stop this from happening, asks mathematician Emily Riehl | Continue reading
From a solar flare to the Jellyfish Nebula, these are some of the photographs in the running for the annual competition organised by the Royal Observatory in London, UK | Continue reading
Sigmund Freud thought we had a superego, an unconscious power that criticised and punished us. Does this idea help explain the internet’s excesses, asks Mark Edmundson's intriguing new book | Continue reading
Marnie is like any 13-year-old – except she has a severe form of muscular dystrophy. Best Interests is an empathetic drama about terrible choices, says Bethan Ackerley | Continue reading
Jupiter’s Galilean moons are promising places to look for life. Now is a great time to see them, says Abigail Beall | Continue reading
The world’s first CRISPR therapy may be approved soon, but sadly it is unlikely to be affordable for hundreds of thousands of people whose pain it could end | Continue reading
Tom Ireland's compelling and original book makes a strong case for revisiting phage therapy – the idea of fighting bacterial infections with viruses | Continue reading
Advances in rocket technology are exciting, but we need to investigate how non-terrestrial gravity affects astronauts' psychology and cognition, says neuroscientist Elisa Raffaella Ferrè | Continue reading
In the face of new evidence, physicists are starting to view the cosmos not as made up of disparate layers, but as a quantum whole linked by entanglement | Continue reading
Objects from Norway and Sweden, some dating from AD 500 to 700, show clear evidence of encryption using runic symbols, the alphabet later used by the Vikings | Continue reading
Population models suggest there would be even more megafauna in Europe now than 130,000 years ago if it weren't for modern humans | Continue reading
Decarbonising steel production is essential if we are to cut global greenhouse gas emissions, but this energy-intensive process has been hard to clean up - until now | Continue reading