New Scientist Feed

Hannah Ritchie's smart new book is sure to whip up major controversy by arguing that the data shows we can win the battle to save the planet. But are its solutions credible?

An invasion of nomadic herders from the Eurasian steppe profoundly changed the genetic landscape of modern Europe, influencing patterns of modern diseases

The mysterious giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki died out up to 295,000 years ago, after failing to adapt to a changing climate and the food variability that went with it

Manatees or sea cows usually inhabit coastal waters, but rumour has it that some are hiding out in Upper Guinea. A scientific expedition goes in search of them

People who live along rivers in the Amazon basin have severe neurological symptoms and dangerously high levels of mercury in their bodies because of pollution from gold mining

The experimental X-59 aircraft is designed to break the sound barrier without making the startling booms produced by current supersonic planes

Water pipes offer a largely untapped source of renewable electricity that could provide 1.4 gigawatts of power in the US alone

The mental health of people who undertake mindfulness or meditation courses offered by their employer is generally no better than those who are not offered such programmes

After a rocket uses up its fuel, the tank generally just becomes dead weight, but a prototype rocket that burns its own fuselage as propellant could solve that problem

NASA’s Artemis II and Artemis III missions to the moon have been delayed by a year after a series of problems with the spacecraft were revealed during testing

The Hubble Space Telescope has pinpointed the origin of the most distant known fast radio burst, which hit our planet in 2022

Fire ants link together to form rafts when their nests are flooded, and unlike most materials the rafts don’t become thinner when they are stretched

A moray eel, a robber fly and an ice-topped slime mould appear in winning images from the Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition

Researchers used AI to design a new material that they used to build a working battery – it requires up to 70 percent less lithium than some competing designs.

We have known for decades that the Mediterranean diet lowers the risk of heart attack and other conditions – now we are starting to understand how certain components of the diet work their magic

Measuring “entanglement islands” that contain copies of information that black holes have lost could help us find an answer to Stephen Hawking’s black hole paradox

Several moon missions are planned for 2024, including some that will attempt to mine for ice on the moon and test out new lunar rovers – and they can teach us about Earth’s history

The global average temperature for 2023 was 1.48°C warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, putting the world on the brink of the Paris Agreement limit

The closest star cluster to the centre of the Milky Way we have seen seems to be falling in, which could teach us about how shredded clusters have helped make the galactic centre so dense

It may be easier than researchers thought to form diamonds inside giant planets, which means that it might rain diamonds on up to a third of the planets we have discovered so far