As AI developers harvest Wikipedia content to train their models, the resulting surge in automated traffic is driving up costs for the non-profit that runs the popular crowdsourced encyclopaedia | Continue reading
A spider species eat their siblings as soon as they die but tolerate each other when they are alive, suggesting a mysterious signal helps them to determine when to dine on a nest mate | Continue reading
Beekeepers often experience some seasonal losses, but this past winter, more than half of all US honeybee colonies died off, potentially the largest loss in US history | Continue reading
Wakes from offshore wind farms can reduce the power generated by neighbouring farms – an issue that is growing more prevalent as turbines get bigger and more numerous | Continue reading
The US anti-vaccine movement is now firmly embedded in the highest levels of government, where those overseeing public health agencies are making drastic cuts both wide and deep | Continue reading
The way bonobos combine vocal sounds to create new meanings suggests the evolutionary building blocks of human language are shared with our closest relatives | Continue reading
Ancient humans living in what is now Ukraine 400,000 years ago may have practised or taught tool-making techniques using mammoth tusks, a softer material than bone | Continue reading
The artificial sweetener sucralose increases brain activity in regions involved in appetite, suggesting it makes people hungrier | Continue reading
Researchers used a synthetic version of moon dust to build working solar panels, which could eventually be created within – and used to power – a moon base of the future | Continue reading
People seem to be less impressed when others lose weight with the drug Ozempic than when they achieve it via lifestyle changes | Continue reading
As China’s vast electrical grid relies more on wind, solar and hydropower, it faces a growing risk of power shortages due to bad weather – and that could encourage the use of coal plants | Continue reading
Nostalgia for video games seems to be strongest for those played during childhood – at least for Nintendo Switch players | Continue reading
High-speed drones will be put to the test in the extreme Arctic environment as part of a project to assess how quickly glaciers in Greenland are retreating | Continue reading
Why are some people drawn towards exploration and challenge – even to the point of extreme danger? Alex Hutchinson's bracing new book unpicks the complex reasons | Continue reading
For decades, autistic women and girls have had to play "diagnostic bingo" before getting their true diagnosis. As new neuroscience offers a fresh understanding of the condition, the time for change is now | Continue reading
Mandy Barker's new book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype imperfections, highlights the ongoing ocean pollution crisis by echoing an influential 19th-century book | Continue reading
A cost-cutting initiative in the world of passenger aviation could see flight-deck staff reduced to just a captain, with their co-pilot replaced by AI. It may save money, but it's a risk too far, argues Paul Marks | Continue reading
Feedback is baffled – baffled! – as to why Facebook owner Meta's attempts to suppress a previous employee's memoir sent the book rocketing to the top of the book charts | Continue reading
Drug trials are vital to medicine, but what of those taking part? Jennie Erin Smith's moving new book about what happened in a rural community hit by early-onset Alzheimer's disease gives them a voice | Continue reading
Our hero Mickey accidentally breaks the rules when he's "reprinted", in a tired take on an old trope, finds film columnist Simon Ings | Continue reading
If you find yourself buffeted by bad news online, our resident advice columnist David Robson has some science-backed tips for managing your consumption and boosting your resilience | Continue reading
A more precise definition of the second is crucial to all sorts of physical measurements – but to get there, scientists have to pack up their extraordinarily fragile optical clocks and take them on tour | Continue reading
A company in the Netherlands says it has perfected a way to create "graft chimeras" with the skin of one plant and the innards of another | Continue reading
From robot rights to ageing and climate change, this month’s science fiction squares up to the big topics, with new titles from authors including Nick Harkaway and Eve Smith | Continue reading
Squeezing exercise into one or two days a week seems to have similar health benefits as doing the same amount of physical activity spread out throughout the week | Continue reading
A termination letter obtained by New Scientist reveals that the Trump administration has gutted the office that runs the country’s only nationwide survey on drug use and mental health | Continue reading
The concept of nothing once sparked a 1000-year-long war, today it might explain dark energy and nothingness even has the potential to destroy the universe, explains physicist Antonio Padilla | Continue reading
Under pressure from Elon Musk’s DOGE task force, NASA is cancelling grants and contracts for everything from lunar dust research to educational programmes | Continue reading
Even animals with very small brains turn out to have cultural traditions, which poses a puzzler for biologists wondering what makes human culture unique | Continue reading
As semaglutide-based weight loss treatments, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, become more popular, new side effects are emerging - and one is hair loss | Continue reading
Urine that has sat in the sun for a while seems to fertilise crops while warding off pests, without affecting the produce's taste | Continue reading
At the Dakshineswar temple complex in India, Hanuman langurs beg for food by grabbing visitors’ legs or tugging on their clothes – and they don’t stop until they get their favourite snacks | Continue reading
After a container ship struck and destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, researchers began calculating the risks of similar catastrophic incidents for other US bridges – and they’re surprisingly high | Continue reading
Cave-dwelling orb spiders have adapted their webs so they act as tripwires for prey that crawl on the walls of the caves | Continue reading
By studying the brains of autistic girls, we now know the condition presents differently in them than in boys, suggesting that huge numbers of women have gone undiagnosed | Continue reading
An eavesdropper hiding inside a black hole could still obtain information about quantum objects on its outside, a finding that reveals how effectively black holes destroy the quantum states near their event horizons | Continue reading
Paranthropus was an ape-like hominin that survived alongside early humans for more than a million years. A fossilised leg belonging to a strikingly small member of the group raises questions about how it did so | Continue reading
The rate at which the planet is warming has sped up since 2010, and now researchers say that China's efforts to clean up air pollution are inadvertently responsible for the majority of this extra warming | Continue reading
Taking aspirin was first linked to a lower risk of colorectal cancer in 1988, but the research into its anti-tumour potential has been full of twists and turns since then | Continue reading
Since the second world war, US economic prosperity and major technological developments have hinged upon the government’s commitment to funding scientific research. The Trump administration is ending that | Continue reading
The US has confirmed more than 480 measles cases across 19 states, the highest total since an outbreak in 2019 sickened more than 1200 people | Continue reading
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe asteroid 2024 YR4, which earlier this year seemed to be at risk of hitting Earth in 2032. Earth is now safe, but astronomers are cheering on a possible collision with the moon | Continue reading
The long-standing question of how animals came to have an anus may have been solved by studies of which genes are active during development in various animals | Continue reading
Some researchers propose that countries should start to rack up a carbon debt once they exceed their carbon budget, obliging them to do more to draw down carbon dioxide, but the idea is unlikely to form part of international climate agreements | Continue reading
When researchers asked people to work on a computer with their phones 1.5 metres away, the amount of time they spent on their phone went down – but they just scrolled social media on their laptop instead | Continue reading
Red specks in the early universe are puzzling astronomers, but a proposed explanation suggests they are the progenitors of supermassive black holes | Continue reading
Photosynthesising microbes in soil may increase their activity as temperatures rise, offsetting some of the carbon emissions expected to be released from peatland and permafrost | Continue reading
After 34 years of searching, astronomers have finally confirmed Neptune has auroras, thanks to data from the James Webb Space Telescope | Continue reading