New Scientist Feed

Dense breast tissue can make tumours hard to spot on mammogram scans, but adding another step to this screening programme could help identify such cases

Social media is awash with videos claiming that taping your mouth closed will improve your sleep – but the evidence doesn't stack up

Should you mow the lawn first or cut the hedge? Mathematics will help you decide what to tackle first, says Peter Rowlett

The premise of Grace Chan’s debut novel – that you can choose to upload yourself to a virtual reality – might sound dated, but this is a stunning big‑picture look at what might lie ahead for us, says Emily H. Wilson

From battling drought to caring for wildlife, shots from the Earth Photo 2025 competition shortlist show how we are coping with a changing world

A huge increase in parking costs in my home of York has provoked outrage. This may sound like a local problem, but reducing car use is an issue for all of us, says Graham Lawton

Feedback is delighted to discover that a team of scientists has tackled the popular school experiment in which children design a device to protect a dropped egg from cracking. But what was the answer?

We have been lucky to dodge nuclear Armageddon so far, but we can't keep trusting to fortune. If we don't want to wipe ourselves out, here's what we need do next, says Mark Lynas

Most parenting manuals end up gathering dust on my bedside table, but Melinda Wenner Moyer's Hello, Cruel World! isn’t one of them

With the US in retreat from climate negotiations, China's Xi Jinping could become the next green global leader

People with incomplete cervical spinal cord injuries showed improvements to their hand and arm movements after receiving a targeted form of vagus nerve stimulation

Teeth are good for chewing and biting, but they are also sensitive – and that may have been their original function hundreds of millions of years ago

After two decades of debate, research confirms that an odd binary star system has an equally odd planetary companion

The globe is criss-crossed by unused fibre-optic cables. Now, researchers are using them to defend against earthquakes and produce an unprecedented map of the underground world

“Fragments” of West Nile virus have been detected in UK mosquitoes, suggesting that the virus is circulating in the country, probably as a result of the warming climate

China's ambitious Tianwen-2 mission will soon be heading to two extremely different space rocks, and should provide vital data to help us understand the nature of asteroids and comets

A record 67,000 square kilometres of primary rainforest was lost from the tropics in 2024, with global warming and El Niño contributing to a massive jump in fire-driven damage

The enigmatic crustacean Alicella gigantea is the world’s largest amphipod, but like all deep-sea creatures it hasn’t proved easy to find

The world’s largest aircraft, called WindRunner, is being designed to carry huge wind turbine blades – but the US military is looking into its own applications for the proposed plane

The galaxy MoM-z14 dates back to 280 million years after the big bang, and the prevalence of such early galaxies is puzzling astronomers