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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

Asteroid 2024 YR4 has a small chance of hitting Earth in 2032, but as astronomers make more observations about its trajectory, the odds of a collision are being refined

Asteroid 2024 YR4 has a small chance of hitting Earth in 2032, but as astronomers make more observations about its trajectory, the odds of a collision seem to be increasing

As the Russia-Ukraine war reaches its third anniversary, militaries around the world are watching the evolution of drone warfare and planning for future conflicts

From the beginning of time to the origins of life, our "when" special series tackles the timing of crucial events and the surprising new discoveries we are making about them

You may think that time started 13.8 billion years ago at the birth of the universe, but physicists with alternative definitions of time have other ideas

Some cyanobacteria have pigments that specialise in harvesting green light to power photosynthesis, which may be because they evolved at a time when the oceans were iron-rich and green-tinged

Artificial intelligences fail to identify optical illusions in images created by other AIs – so these images could form the basis of a new kind of CAPTCHA test

A person with neuroblastoma, which occurs when developing nerve cells in children turn cancerous, has remained tumour-free for over 18 years thanks to CAR T-cell therapy