New Scientist Feed

A rise in cancers among younger people, particularly colorectal cancer, is prompting speculation on social media over the causes. Only slow, careful research can get to the truth

Supersolids are strange materials that behave like both a solid and a fluid due to quantum effects – and now researchers have created an intriguing new type of supersolid from laser light

Hominins may have learned how to make bone tools by adapting the techniques they mastered for stone ones

Software used by banks and the space industry may still rely on archaic code. We went in search of the oldest code in use and asked, what happens when it glitches?

The stars as seen from Earth would have looked dimmer 14 million years ago, as the solar system was in the middle of passing through clouds of dust and gas

The Turing award, often considered the Nobel prize of computing, has gone to two computer scientists for their work on reinforcement learning, a key technique in training artificial intelligence models

When competition for food is high, both chimps and bonobos sometimes rub their genitals together to cope

The Trump administration’s latest move to improve government efficiency has purged tech consultants that worked to improve government efficiency

Water is an essential part of life on Earth, and possibly elsewhere – and now it we know it may have formed not long after the start of the universe

A strange new conception of how time warps across the universe does away with cosmology's most mysterious entity, dark energy

We are starting to understand how Greenland sharks can live for centuries without commonly developing tumours

We can describe the quantum realm using straightforward mathematics – but once we try to translate these ideas into the real world, things get weird. Our quantum columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan explains why

Colossal Biosciences has altered several genes in mice to make them look more mammoth-like, but the company is far from its goal of fully resurrecting woolly mammoths by 2028

Soil fungi can make a compound that disrupts how cow stomachs produce the potent greenhouse gas methane

Encryption would normally be expected to slow down computation, but applying the tools of cryptography to "trick" an algorithm can actually make it work faster

DARPA scientists are exploring ways to grow massive biological objects, such as telescope antennas or huge nets to snag debris, in space

Colorectal cancers will soon be the number one cause of cancer death among people under 50. Could changes in lifestyle and environment be to blame?

John Scalzi, Silvia Park and Ai Jang all have new books out this month. Whether it’s time travel or a moon made of cheese that takes your fancy, there’s some sci-fi here for you

The DNA of Yersinia pestis bacteria has been found in a Bronze Age sheep, offering a clue to how the plague may have spread through prehistoric farming communities

Consuming dairy is increasingly being linked to a lower risk of colorectal cancer, but the true relationship between the two is hard to untangle