New Scientist Feed

Multiple studies suggest that speaking more than one language pushes back the onset of dementia, but doesn't seem to stop it entirely

The Trump administration’s pause on US foreign assistance could lead to an estimated 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and more than 8300 pregnancy-related deaths

Millions of years after humans vanish, fossil clues showing how we lived and dominated the planet may confuse future civilisations, says a new book by Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz

Nobody doubts that human activities have dramatically transformed Earth, so why has there been no official recognition of the Anthropocene?

Using AI to produce footage of video games with a consistent world and rules could prove useful to game designers

An analysis of more than 270,000 glaciers worldwide reveals that they have lost around 7 trillion tonnes of ice since 2000, raising sea levels by 2 centimetres

Spreading crushed rocks on fields can absorb CO2 from the air – now chemists have devised a way to turbocharge this process by creating more reactive minerals

Researchers at Microsoft say they have created so-called topological qubits, which would be exceptionally resistant to errors, but their claim has been met with scepticism

The discovery that farming might not have been the catalyst for civilisation means we must completely rethink the timeline of the first complex societies

Researchers who have been given access to Google's new AI "co-scientist" tool are enthusiastic about its potential, but it isn't yet clear whether it can make truly novel discoveries

Today, the upheavals of plate tectonics continually reshape Earth. When this began is much disputed - and we can’t fully understand how life began to thrive on our planet until we figure it out

Fossils and genetics are starting to point to life emerging surprisingly soon after Earth formed, when the planet was hellishly hot and seemingly uninhabitable

Pigmented algae are well adapted to grow on exposed ice in the Arctic as the snow line recedes, raising concerns of a feedback loop that could lead to faster sea level rise

The largest study of its kind has revealed how both genetics and lifestyle play a role in developing certain age-related conditions, such as dementia, lung cancer and heart disease

The weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation could be bolstering rainfall over the Amazon, reducing the risk it will reach a tipping point

Wholemeal bread can be shaped into carbon electrodes that could replace traditional metal conductors in electrical devices

The often stereotyped and offensive responses from AI chatbots role-playing as humans can be explained by flaws in how large language models attempt to portray demographic identities

The gas giant WASP-121b, also known as Tylos, has an atmospheric structure unlike any we have ever seen, and the fastest winds on any planet

By looking ever further back in time, the James Webb Space Telescope is at last revealing the first galaxies – and a very strange young cosmos

The more we discover about our species' family tree, the harder it becomes to pinpoint when exactly Homo sapiens emerged, raising questions over what it really means to be human