Christopher Paolini's Fractal Noise and Temi Oh's More Perfect are among our top sci-fi novels to read while you're away | Continue reading
People are increasingly grappling with the impacts of a shifting climate in Bangladesh, something that journalist Fabeha Monir has has captured in a series of photos | Continue reading
From brightly coloured baby books about frogs to early ecology for 10-year-olds and dark teen sci-fi set on the ocean floor, here are the best books for young minds | Continue reading
You don’t need eggs, flour and special gadgets to make your own pasta – semolina, water and a good knead will do it, says Sam Wong | Continue reading
For executives or politicians with an eye on the next financial quarter or electoral cycle, net zero has clear appeal. But we shouldn't use it as a way to delay action on tackling climate change | Continue reading
Researchers at Microsoft say they have created elusive quasiparticles called Majorana zero modes – but scientists outside the company are sceptical | Continue reading
The huge diversity of the gut microbiome of Hadza hunter-gatherers from Tanzania hints at how industrialisation has influenced the variety of people’s internal microbe communities | Continue reading
New research shows that tumours are home to a rich ecosystem of bacteria and fungi that influence cancer progression - opening up incredible new ways to fight the disease | Continue reading
Robots that respond to a person's movements in a fraction of a second could be used for a real-life fighting game | Continue reading
Two gay medical students attempt to navigate the AIDS crisis – and their own love – in David Glass’s new play at New York City Center | Continue reading
21 June is the summer solstice or longest day in the northern hemisphere and winter solstice or shortest day in the southern hemisphere | Continue reading
Microbes that produce nitrogen have made a big difference for reducing fertiliser-related emissions and pollution across millions of acres of farmland in the US. The microbes can be applied directly to the soil or as a coating on seeds | Continue reading
Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, seem able to think ahead and prepare for two possible futures – the only animal apart from humans known to do so | Continue reading
Orcas have been documented damaging or sinking boats off the coast of Spain and Portugal, but these altercations may simply be the whales scratching their backs on boats or playing terrifying games | Continue reading
Mining cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could be done using quantum computers, cutting their electricity use by 90 per cent | Continue reading
A centimetre-sized robot with a soft body and metallic scales inspired by pangolins can stop bleeding or destroy cells from inside the body using heat | Continue reading
Rivers are awash with manure, fertiliser and pesticides from farming. This is more polluting even than sewage, so what can be done? | Continue reading
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has made progress towards halting the illegal destruction of Amazon rainforest, but political opposition and the incoming El Niño will bring further challenges | Continue reading
Researchers attached pill bugs and chitons to a robot arm to show how creatures might work with machines, but it isn't clear how useful this would be | Continue reading
A 5-kilometre-deep well is supplying heat to the Eden Project visitor attraction in Cornwall, but despite the UK’s significant resources, it lags behind other European countries in exploiting geothermal energy | Continue reading
Extremely long necks probably helped ancient marine reptiles ambush prey in murky waters, but also made them easy targets for decapitation by predators | Continue reading
By combining a solar fuel cell that converts carbon dioxide into fuel with a plastic recycling system, researchers can create sustainable fuels and useful chemicals | Continue reading
Sara Imari Walker, who developed Assembly Theory with chemist Lee Cronin, explains how the theory's definition of life might help us find it on other planets | Continue reading
Waters around the UK and Ireland have been classified as experiencing a category 4 (extreme) marine heatwave, as the North Atlantic ocean continues to see extraordinary warmth | Continue reading
Two independent teams of researchers found that putting the silvery metal scandium under extreme pressure makes it into a superconductor at a temperature higher than any other element on its own | Continue reading
A distant star called FU Orionis has been shining extraordinarily bright for the last 85 years, and it may be because it is incinerating a young, nearby planet that could be fully consumed in another 300 years | Continue reading
Levels of pollutants in the UK's rivers are tested by random sampling, a method that experts say is decades out of date and not thorough enough to tackle the issues facing the waterways | Continue reading
As part of New Scientist's Save Britain's Rivers campaign, we've rounded up the best citizen science projects that let you play an active role in improving the nation's waterways | Continue reading
Neural recordings from chickadees have found unique patterns of activity that occur when they hide food and then retrieve it later, and they may represent how memories are indexed in the brain | Continue reading
Lab-reared insects sometimes struggle to compete for mates with wild males, but an encounter with a robotic replica seems to improve their performance | Continue reading
Changes in the distribution of groundwater around the planet between 1993 and 2010 were enough to make Earth's poles drift by 80 centimetres | Continue reading
Particles from wildfire smoke may cause the formation of cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere far away from the location of the fires | Continue reading
If language models such as ChatGPT are trained using the outputs of other AIs, they will become heavily biased, overly simple and disconnected from reality, researchers warn | Continue reading
Global weather conditions are showing extraordinary levels of heating this year. With this adding to human-driven climate change, 2023 could be the hottest year we have ever seen | Continue reading
Customers in the UK, Germany and Italy will soon be able to replace gas boilers with heat pumps from Swedish company Aira and pay a monthly fee instead of a hefty installation cost | Continue reading
A multicoloured stink bug found in Western Australia has forked horns for camouflage, mysterious patches of matted hair and the males have peculiar tusks that may be used to win over females | Continue reading
A slew of newly found artefacts in South America are revealing surprisingly familiar ways ancient people in the region expressed their creativity, including sculpted figurines, a communal drum and perhaps a previously unrecognised form of writing | Continue reading
A new-to-science species of beetle is marked by a distinct yellow band on its shoulders, long hair-like scales all over its body and legs, and the unique shape of its torso | Continue reading
A global survey reveals that common species of coral reef shark are in sharp decline, and rays are more abundant in reefs where sharks have been depleted | Continue reading
Most modern plants grow leaves in a pattern that follows the Fibonacci sequence, but a reconstruction of a 400-million-year-old plant reveals that its leaves grew much more chaotically | Continue reading
Atoms of a metal don't like to bond with one another, but chemists have succeeded in forging a metallic bond between two beryllium atoms | Continue reading
The first human embryo-like structures have been created from stem cells, in a move that could help scientists study the causes of early miscarriages | Continue reading
Chalk streams, a type of nutrient-rich river found mostly in England, are under threat from pollution and over-exploitation. Fines paid by water firms will be used to restore these rivers, but it may take decades | Continue reading
Particles produced by cosmic rays hitting Earth's atmosphere, called muons, have been proposed as an alternative to GPS navigation that would work underground - and now it has been tested for real | Continue reading
Transferring a mother's vaginal fluid to a baby born by Caesarean section was linked to their development being more advanced at 6 months | Continue reading
In the early morning on 17 June you will be able to see Mercury, Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn all appear in the sky together - here's how you can spot them, wherever you are in the world | Continue reading
Some students take medicines like methylphenidate, often sold under the brand name Ritalin, to boost their performance before an exam, but research shows these drugs don't improve how well people do in tests | Continue reading
Bacteria that contribute to gum disease may be a cause of the gynaecological condition endometriosis, which means it could be treated with antibiotics | Continue reading