New Scientist Feed

The salt we spread to keep roads safe in winter is damaging ecosystems and threatening water supplies. Do alternatives, from coffee grounds to cheese brine, work?

A healthy rhesus monkey has been born after being cloned from fetal cells, but creating a clone of an adult human being would be much harder

With sperm counts falling around the world, researchers are finally getting to grips with the underlying causes - and coming up with ways to reverse the trend

Sperm counts are down worldwide, but researchers are finally getting to grips with why - and coming up with ways to reverse the trend

From The Matrix to Sliding Doors via Everything Everywhere All at Once, physicist Paul Halpern reveals his favourite films about the multiverse

Soil samples from a long-running UK experiment show that microplastic pollution has risen sharply in the past 50 years and is much higher in fields treated with organic or inorganic fertilisers

Expedition leaders say they have found several new species of octopus using a remotely operated vehicle around 3 kilometres deep near Costa Rica

Greater covid-19 vaccine uptake could have prevented several thousand deaths and hospitalisations in UK during a coronavirus wave in 2022

The latest coronavirus variant, JN.1, is more infectious, but seems to be causing less severe illness than in previous waves

Efforts are underway to tidy up the ocean's biggest plastic hotspot. But this cleanup operation could be damaging a unique ecosystem and doing little to stop the overwhelming plastic problem

Several enormous craters left by explosions have been spotted in Siberia over the past 15 years, and a new explanation links them to hot gas – and climate change