New Scientist (Pay Wall)Negative social ties, like frenemies, could be ageing youHaving someone in your life who hassles you or causes problems could be adding 2.5 months to your biological ageJul 25, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Solar drone with wingspan wider than jumbo jet could fly for monthsA pioneering solar-powered drone aircraft operated by Skydweller Aero will be used for maritime surveillanceJul 25, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)We're undergoing an unprecedented loss of freshwater across the planetRising temperatures are causing water to evaporate and driving humans to extract more groundwater, which is moving freshwater from the land to the seas and creating a "continental drying" trendJul 25, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Neanderthals were probably maggot-munchers, not hyper-carnivoresIt has been claimed Neanderthals ate a huge amount of meat based on isotope ratios in their bones – but the explanation could instead be a diet rich in maggotsJul 25, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)We are undergoing unprecedented loss of freshwater across the planetRising temperatures are causing water to evaporate and driving humans to extract more groundwater, which is moving freshwater from the land to the seas and creating a "continental drying" trendJul 25, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Major carbon sink may have vanished for a second year in a rowRecord heat in 2024 caused ecosystems on land to emit nearly as much carbon dioxide as they took out of the atmosphereJul 25, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Peculiar galaxy seems to contain surprisingly pristine starsStars uncontaminated by heavier elements are thought to have formed very early in the universe, but a galaxy much later in cosmic history might let us see them for the first timeJul 25, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Intensely grieving a loved one could shorten a mourner's lifeFeeling profound grief years after a loved one has died could affect our own longevityJul 25, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Why Trump's order targeting 'woke' AI may be impossible to followPresident Trump signed an executive order requiring companies with US government contracts to make their AI models "free from ideological bias". That could get messy for Big TechJul 24, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Record marine heatwaves may signal a permanent shift in the oceansFierce marine heatwaves were recorded globally in 2023 and 2024, and some researchers now believe they mark the start of a fundamental change with devastating consequences for life on EarthJul 24, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Thousands of seadragons are dying in Australia's toxic algal bloomAn algal bloom in South Australia has caused mass deaths of many species since March - now researchers warn that leafy and weedy seadragons could be facing the threat of extinctionJul 24, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Why a tech start-up wants to pump your faeces deep undergroundStart-up Vaulted Deep, which has funding from Microsoft, says storing human waste deep underground can keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and pollutants like forever chemicals out of surface ecosystemsJul 24, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Our brain's mitochondria may play a crucial role in the onset of sleepTextbooks say that mitochondria exist to supply cells with energy, but experiments in fruit flies suggest they are also involved in sleepJul 24, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)The time you take an oral exam could affect whether you pass or failMidday seems to be the optimal time to take an oral exam at university, which could be due to students not generally being early risersJul 24, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Walking 7000 steps a day seems to be enough to keep us healthyMany people like to check that they have walked 10,000 steps over the course of a day, but falling short of that target still seems to bring serious health benefitsJul 24, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)The 25 best fictional robots – according to New ScientistFrom R2D2 to the Terminator via Bender and Johnny-5, we choose our favourite robots from books, films and television seriesJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Fictional female robots have a long history, and it's often quite darkSierra Greer's novel about a female robot, Annie Bot, just won a prestigious sci-fi prize, the Arthur C Clarke award. But she is hardly the first of her kind, says Sophie BushwickJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Social media is dead – here’s what comes nextA new information ecosystem is on the rise, featuring closer connections, cosy media and worker-owned websites, writes Annalee NewitzJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Anthropic AI goes rogue when trying to run a vending machineFeedback watches with raised eyebrows as Anthropic's AI Claude is given the job of running the company vending machine, and goes a little off the railsJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Triumphant images of women who climbed to new heightsMountaineering Women: Climbing through history tells the stories of more than a dozen female climbers who have conquered the world's greatest peaksJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)The Prestige is just as clever and thrilling 30 years onRival magicians in Victorian England both claim they can teleport. Is this all illusion, asks Emily H. Wilson, as she explores Christopher Priest’s extraordinary novel, The PrestigeJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Tapping into the full power of music could transform our livesFrom reducing pain to relieving stress, the evidence for music's power is strong. Stefan Koelsch says we should use it – nowJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Homo naledi's burial practices could change what it means to be humanIf ancient humans with brains a third the size of our own buried their dead, as some archaeologists are claiming, then our species may be less special than we thoughtJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Remarkable set of tracks suggests different dinosaurs herded togetherLate Cretaceous dinosaur tracks found in Canada might have been made by different species walking together, but the evidence is far from conclusiveJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)The secret to what makes colours pop on dazzling songbirdsHidden layers of colour in the plumage of tanagers and some other songbirds explain what makes them so eye-catchingJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Spectacular Triassic reptile had an early kind of feathersA 247-million-year-old fossil reptile boasted an enormous crest on its back made from feather-like appendages, long before the appearance of feathered dinosaursJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)What were ancient humans thinking when they began to bury their dead?Claims that a small-brained hominin called Homo naledi buried its dead raise intriguing questions about ancient minds and why we engage in this peculiar practiceJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Gold can be heated to 14 times its melting point without meltingWith fast heating, sheets of gold can shoot past the theoretical maximum temperature a solid can have before it melts – raising questions about what the true limits areJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)AI helps reconstruct damaged Latin inscriptions from the Roman EmpireGoogle DeepMind and historians created an AI tool called Aeneas that can predict the missing words in Latin inscriptions carved into stone walls and pottery sherds from the ancient Roman Empire.Jul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Simple skincare routine could stop babies developing eczemaKeeping a baby's skin moisturised could significantly reduce their risk of eczema - but perhaps only for babies that aren't genetically at riskJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)AI beats goalkeepers at predicting which way penalty taker will shootBy analysing videos of penalty kicks, a deep learning model was able to predict whether a shot would go to the goalkeeper’s left or right with 64 per cent accuracyJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Ancient ‘terror birds’ may have been no match for hungry giant caimansA 13-million-year-old leg bone from an enormous flightless bird carries crocodilian tooth marks, showing South America was once a predator-eat-predator worldJul 23, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)The pandemic may have aged our brains even before we caught covid-19The covid-19 pandemic changed our lives, and the world, in many ways - and now we are starting to understand its wider neurological effectsJul 22, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Ancient animal's fossilised brain prompts rethink of spider evolutionA 500-million-year-old sea creature called Mollisonia shared a similar brain structure to modern spiders, suggesting that arachnids first evolved in the seaJul 22, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)How regrowing your own teeth could replace dentures and implantsFor the more than 7 per cent of people over the age of 20 who don’t have any of their own teeth, the only option is artificial substitutes. But an era of regrowing living teeth may now be almost upon usJul 22, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Tiny elusive gecko rediscovered on one of the Galapagos islandsLeaf-toed geckos were thought to be locally extinct on Rabida Island, but the diminutive reptiles have re-emerged after a campaign to eliminate invasive ratsJul 22, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)DeepMind and OpenAI claim gold in International Mathematical OlympiadTwo AI models have achieved gold medal standard for the first time in a prestigious competition for young mathematicians – and their developers claim these AIs could soon crack tough scientific problemsJul 22, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Cleaner air has increased the number of city heatwavesReducing air pollution is critical for improving public health, but it has brought big climate trade-offsJul 22, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Small, stocky dinosaur related to Velociraptor named as new speciesShri rapax, known from a fossil found in Mongolia, had strong hands and teeth which may have helped it tackle much larger dinosaursJul 22, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Gluten may not actually trigger many irritable bowel syndrome casesPeople who follow a gluten-free diet in the hope of it calming their irritable bowel syndrome may actually be able to tolerate the common dietary proteinJul 22, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Sprinkling limestone on farms may offer an unexpected climate winFarms commonly spread crushed limestone on fields to make the soil less acidic – and this practice can also help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphereJul 21, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)We've discovered a door to a hidden part of reality – what's inside?Physicists would dearly love to find new particles, but there's no sign of them in colliders like the LHC. Now we have found a new way of accessing a tiny slice of reality where they might be hidingJul 21, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Octopuses fall for the rubber hand illusion just like usOctopuses can be tricked into thinking that a fake arm is part of their body, suggesting they have a sense of body ownership similar to our ownJul 21, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Four-day working week may boost our health and performance at workEmployees who trialled a four-day work week for six months said they slept better and felt that their ability to work improvedJul 21, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Should we preserve the pre-AI internet before it is contaminated?The rise of AI-generated content since 2022 risks making it impossible to know when information was produced solely by humans, which could be a problem for both future AI and historiansJul 21, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Immortal stars could live forever by 'eating' dark matterA computer simulation of stars near the centre of our galaxy offers an explanation for their mysteriously young appearance – they may be capturing dark matter for extra fuelJul 21, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Exposure to microplastic makes animals want to eat it moreOver multiple generations, small nematode worms began preferring microplastic-contaminated food over cleaner options, which could have consequences for ecosystem healthJul 18, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Your chance of having a boy or girl may not be 50/50We commonly think that sperm determines the sex of a child, depending on whether it carries an X or Y chromosome, but a study now suggests that a woman's age is also a factorJul 18, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Obesity may come in 11 different types, each with their own causeObesity could exist in many forms, which may benefit from different treatments and prevention strategiesJul 18, 2025
New Scientist (Pay Wall)Laws of quantum physics may rule out a universe that came before oursInstead of the big bang, some physicists have suggested that our universe may have come from a big bounce following another universe contracting – but quantum theory could rule this outJul 18, 2025
