Pure Science

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Somewhere at the edge of mathematics lurks a number so large that it breaks the very foundations of our understanding - and in 2025 we came a step closer to finding it

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

A village buried by a landslide, the world’s largest tidal bore and the aftermath of ferocious storms and wildfires appear in our pick of images from environment stories this year

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Tantalising signs of past microbial life showed up on Mars this year, but to truly know whether they contain the answer to the biggest question in the universe, we will need to bring samples back to Earth

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

At the Q2B Silicon Valley conference, scientific and business leaders of the quantum computing industry hailed "spectacular" progress being made towards practical devices – but said that challenges remain

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

The detection of mercurial particles of light emanating from mice led to a flurry of interest in biophotons, a mysterious phenomenon that could have applications in agriculture

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Palaeontologists reported some remarkable dinosaur fossils this year, including a Velociraptor relative, a dome-headed pachycephalosaur and one of the most heavily armoured creatures that ever lived

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

A microscope that cost less than £50 and took under 3 hours to build using a common 3D printer could be transformative for students and researchers with limited funding

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

A new theory of "dark photons" attempted to explain a centuries-old experiment in a new way this year, in an effort to change our understanding of the nature of light

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Astronomers discovered a new moon of Uranus and hundreds of moons around Saturn over the past year, and there may be many more yet to be found

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Focusing on the futuristic tech that appears in sci-fi without paying attention to the actual point of the story is a big mistake, says Annalee Newitz

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

The ideas presented in George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan's The Neural Mind are fascinating, but the writing is far less compelling

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

With the human family tree now more like a hedge and twice as many known moons, Bill Bryson talks to the New Scientist podcast about refreshing his 2003 bestselling book on science

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

The festive season is a period of social connection for many of us, but alone time can be equally enriching, says Thuy-vy Nguyen, principal investigator of the Solitude Lab

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Feedback's eyebrows are raised at tech millionaire Bryan Johnson's latest exploits, which involve Grimes, music, and hallucinogenic mushrooms

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Careful slope monitoring prevented mass casualties in the landslide at Blatten, Switzerland, this year, but mountain communities may face a growing risk of disasters

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Growing evidence reveals that creativity is one of the best-kept secrets for boosting your health. From live theatre to a quick crafting break, here’s how to harness the power of art in your everyday life

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

The year’s most memorable moments from astronomy and space exploration include a double-detonating supernova, a private moon landing and a stunning lunar eclipse

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Scientists cultivating partnerships of fungi and algae believe their invention has far-out implications for how we create the buildings of the future

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

An experimental gene therapy seems to slow the progression of Huntington’s disease by about 75 per cent, and researchers are working to make its complicated delivery much more practical

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Ejaculating within 48 hours of providing a sperm sample for IVF seems to lead to greater success rates than abstaining from ejaculation for longer

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

The liquid ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa appears to be completely sealed off from the planet’s surface, which may reduce the chances of finding life there

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

From mudstones on Mars to strange gases in exoplanet atmospheres, tentative evidence for extraterrestrial life is starting to come thick and fast. But when we've found it, how will we know for sure?

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

By requesting copies of the then-UK technology secretary's ChatGPT logs, New Scientist set a precedent for how freedom of information laws apply to chatbot interactions, helping to hold governments to account

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

From vitamin C to your microbiome and mindset, the latest science of immunity is often counterintuitive. Here's how to give your system a fighting chance to overcome infection

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Mysterious ‘little red dots’ seen by the James Webb Space Telescope can be explained by a new kind of black hole enshrouded in an enormous ball of glowing gas

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Astronomers thought they had seen the "first hints of life on an alien world" this year, but they disappeared under closer scrutiny

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

We have only just started to understand how our brains clean themselves, but columnist Helen Thomson finds promising evidence for how to boost this process

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Rapid advances in the kind of problems that quantum computers can tackle suggest that they are closer than ever to becoming useful tools of scientific discovery

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

From massive solar panels to the difficulty of staying cool - not to mention high-energy radiation - there are a lot of engineering problems that need to be solved before we can build data centres in space

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

After starting the year with its first known bird flu death, the US expanded its efforts to contain the virus, which enabled it to end its public health emergency response months later

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

It's easy to assume that the most talented adults among us were once gifted children, but it turns out that talent during childhood is no guide to later success

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

New laws in the UK, Australia and France were brought in during 2025 with the aim of protecting children from harmful content online, but experts remain divided on whether they will achieve this goal

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Excavations of sewer drains at a Roman fort in northern England have revealed the presence of several parasites that can cause debilitating illness in humans

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

A pair of nascent planets have been caught smashing together around the nearby star Fomalhaut, and in doing so have solved the puzzle of its famous ‘planet’

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

The National Center for Atmospheric Research has played a leading role in providing data, modelling and supercomputing to researchers around the world – but the Trump administration is set to shut it down

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Our cells follow 24-hour circadian rhythms that regulate our blood sugar levels and are heavily influenced by light exposure. Scientists have harnessed this to show that just sitting by a window improves blood sugar control in people with...

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

The largest study so far into the genetics of chronic fatigue syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis, has implicated 259 genes – six times more than those identified just four months ago

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

A distant world with carbon in its atmosphere and extraordinarily high temperatures is unlike any other planet we’ve seen, and it’s unclear how it could have formed

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Our understanding of the true nature of the cosmos relies on measurements of its expansion, but cosmologists have been arguing back and forth about it for more than 100 years

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Satellites in orbit would begin to collide in a matter of days if they lost manoeuvrability during a solar storm or other outage

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

The rings of Saturn are normally thought to be flat, but measurements by the Cassini spacecraft show that some of their particles fly hundreds of thousands of kilometres above and below the thin main discs

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Professional footballer players who became injured while on their period took longer to recover than when injuries occurred at other times of their menstrual cycle

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Under current climate policies, 79 per cent of the world’s glaciers will disappear by 2100, endangering the water supply for 2 billion people and raising sea levels dramatically

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Many industries are eyeing up hydrogen as a source of clean energy, but with supplies of green hydrogen limited, we should prioritise the areas where it could have the most positive impact on carbon emissions, say researchers

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Efforts to lower the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere may come too late to prevent long-term changes to the Arctic

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

There are two small moons in orbit around Mars today, but both may be remnants of a much larger moon that had enough of a gravitational pull to drive tides in the Red Planet's lost lakes and seas

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Controlling qubits with quantum superpositions allows them to dramatically violate a fundamental limit and encode information for about five times longer during quantum computations

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the microbe responsible for gonorrhoea, is developing resistance to most antibiotics, which means we need new drugs to treat the condition. An antibiotic called zoliflodacin might be part of a solution

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

In a stunning reversal, Disney has changed tack with regard to safeguarding its copyrighted characters from incorporation into AI tools – perhaps a sign that no one can stem the tide of AI

New Scientist (Pay Wall)

White-sided dolphins seem to help killer whales "scout" and catch Chinook salmon near Vancouver Island, then eat the leftovers