Our soils are teeming with networks of fungi, and we're starting to understand how important they are | Continue reading
It was widely thought that the movement of water through Venus flytrap cells caused the trap to close, but detailed experiments have led scientists to propose an alternative mechanism | Continue reading
Global weather agencies have declared that El Niño has begun, and models show it is more likely than not to be a "super" El Niño. The climate pattern boosts extreme weather around the world, and could lead to record temperatures | Continue reading
An experiment with a toy universe made up of extremely cold atoms shows how time can emerge from quantum interactions, instead of existing by default | Continue reading
Student Gunnar Hartmann wins Nature’s 2026 Scientist at Work photography competition for this shot of migrating northern bald ibis in Spain | Continue reading
With Steven Spielberg’s new extraterrestrial film Disclosure Day just out, it’s the ideal time to watch Close Encounter of the Third Kind – perhaps the perfect UFO film, says film columnist Bethan Ackerley | Continue reading
A study of 4.5 million people suggests that ex-smokers who take up vaping are more at risk of dying from lung cancer than people who quit without the use of e-cigarettes | Continue reading
Palaeontologist Steve Brusatte's The Story of Birds offers an excellent and sometimes startling account of bird evolution, finds Michael Marshall | Continue reading
Feedback is alarmed by a study that explored how funny people think they are, and that discovered certain traits in those who rate themselves the most humorous | Continue reading
Europe’s largest land animal, the bison, is thought to be relatively unthreatened by predators, but footage from Białowieża Primaeval Forest in Poland shows it does face attacks from wolves | Continue reading
Researchers diving 7 kilometres deep in a crewed submersible have discovered a vast collection of whale bones, including fossils up to 5 million years old and species new to science | Continue reading
The outer solar system once seemed like a quiet backwater. But a glut of tiny, strange moons with unruly orbits are coming into view, revealing hints of a surprising past – and the origin of Saturn's rings | Continue reading
Climate models suggest a small nuclear war in the tropics would do even more damage to the ozone layer than a larger nuclear war in more northerly latitudes, increasing exposure to dangerous ultraviolet radiation all over the world | Continue reading
A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties | Continue reading
A near miss with a Waymo while cycling through London hasn't changed my optimistic stance on driverless cars, but we can't ever let our guard down, says Matthew Sparkes | Continue reading
Uncrewed ground vehicles have already been tested for defending the front line by the Ukrainian military. Despite their limitations, these remotely controlled robots could be the deciding factor in many conflicts | Continue reading
Scrape marks inside a skull and sharpened limb bones in a set of remains found in Scotland may be evidence of unusual Iron Age funerary rituals | Continue reading
A complex ecosystem of woolly mammoths, bison, horses and big cats has been elucidated by studying the faeces of small rodents that probably ate the bigger animals | Continue reading
Bleaching has devastated reefs around the world, raising fears of an irreversible shift. Yet new interventions have revealed that corals can be remarkably resilient if we can give them enough help to recover | Continue reading
Drill cores at the impact site of the Chicxulub asteroid show evidence that, alongside widespread destruction, the collision created a vast underground ecosystem filled with hot water that sheltered microbial life | Continue reading
Brown dwarfs are somewhere between the size of a planet and a star, so how could we have potentially mistaken two of them for distant galaxies? Columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein argues that solving this cosmic mix-up is particularly possible now, as galaxy research has never bee … | Continue reading
Physics is considered a cold, hard science – but it will transform your life if you view it with a bit more subjectivity, says Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | Continue reading
Anthropic has warned that recursive-self-improving AI could be on the horizon, but the truth is the company is more immediately concerned with marketing itself for a blockbuster initial public offering on the stock market, says Matthew Sparkes | Continue reading
The out-of-Africa migration, in which ancient humans went on to inhabit every other continent except Antarctica, may not have been one moment in time, but a long and slow process. Columnist Michael Marshall examines how archaeologists are rethinking this critical part of our hist … | Continue reading
Lapses in memory are a normal part of ageing but can also be signs of dementia. Here’s how to distinguish between typical brain ageing and cognitive decline | Continue reading
A diverse range of bird species has been recorded at a solar park on rewetted peatland in Germany, suggesting that combining energy generation with habitat restoration could benefit biodiversity, the climate and the economy | Continue reading
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned tech firms, including Apple and Google, that they must voluntarily implement tools to stop children sharing explicit images, but experts warn this is easier said than done | Continue reading
Each decade the world is losing over 7 per cent of its freshwater storage capacity to sediment build-up, according to an analysis of over half a million reservoirs | Continue reading
One-third of people with anorexia nervosa don’t recover and treatment has remained stagnant for years. Now we’re beginning to understand how the condition takes over the mind | Continue reading
Endometriosis is usually thought of as a gynaecological condition, but a huge study shows it has links with cholesterol levels, inflammation and an altered microbiome | Continue reading
Mice seemed to reap some of the benefits of sleep by having their brain activity stimulated while they were awake, and the researchers plan to test the approach on people | Continue reading
A team in the US has reported promising results after using an improved form of CRISPR to gene-edit human embryos, but a major issue remains unsolved | Continue reading
Scientists warn that the Trump Administration's push to dismantle a vital network of ocean sensing instruments will stymie crucial weather and climate monitoring in the Pacific and Atlantic | Continue reading
The modern world depends on open-source software maintained by volunteers, but the added demands of checking and fixing AI-written submissions are causing some to burn out and quit | Continue reading
Mice that contain cells with an added rat chromosome have been created by scientists. The next step is to try this with frozen elephant tissue – and if that works, the team will try it with frozen mammoths | Continue reading
A seemingly simple set of rules kicks off a kind of mathematical magic trick, which has kept great minds busy since the 1930s. Columnist Jacob Aron explores the origins of the Collatz conjecture, why it is so addictive to mathematicians and whether AI could help us solve it once … | Continue reading
Parents report loving their partners less within the first year of having a child, but that doesn't mean the feeling is permanent or inevitable | Continue reading
A patch of ocean south-east of Greenland is the only place on Earth that is cooling, and it could be a sign that the warm water "conveyor belt" in the Atlantic is slowing down | Continue reading
Rachel Carson’s look at the dire effects of industrial and agricultural pollution birthed the modern environmental movement when it was first published – and remains as crucial a read today, finds Rowan Hooper | Continue reading
A glacier could have carried the giant sandstone at the centre of Stonehenge southwards from north-east Scotland, but this scenario appears unlikely | Continue reading
Global warming will amplify the impacts of El Niño events, and could also make them much stronger and more far-reaching | Continue reading
Actor Ben McKenzie explores the world of crypto in an entertaining documentary that doesn't shy away from calling out those who have promoted the currency | Continue reading
A new retrospective of M.C. Escher’s work opens this week. Explore some of his most mind-bending, mathematically inspired works here | Continue reading
A new retrospective of the artist beloved by mathematicians opens this week. Get up close to the art with our interactive story | Continue reading
Giulia Enders made her name with Gut, an exploration of our intestines. Now, in the compelling follow-up Organ Speak, she’s listening to what our other organs are telling us | Continue reading
Feedback discovers Halupedia, an online encyclopedia that is 100 per cent generated by AI, offering such delights as the 19nd century and The Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Tuesdays | Continue reading
Why do we have big brains? Or walk on two legs? Biological anthropologist and broadcaster Alice Roberts talks human exceptionalism, evolution and her new book Humans with Michael Marshall | Continue reading
Despite AI's dizzying improvements in mathematical ability, its successes show just how integral human mathematicians are to the scientific process | Continue reading