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The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

A new show at the Royal West of England Academy brings together a series of works that interweave art and science

We have long drawn parallels between ants and humans. Now we are comparing the insects to computers. It is time to stop using ants as analogues for ourselves and our machines, says Annalee Newitz

Fungi have become Hollywood’s go-to bad guys. But as yet another story focuses on Cordyceps, Nick Crumpton says we are missing a chance to broaden our fictional horizons

Feedback enjoys the debunking of a study that suggested a 2022 solar eclipse had been "anticipated" by a bunch of trees

Mathematician Hannah Fry travels to the front lines of AI in her new BBC documentary AI Confidential with Hannah Fry. She talks to Bethan Ackerley about what the technology is doing to us – for better and for worse

Prolonged grief disorder affects around 1 in 20 people, and we're starting to understand the neuroscience behind it

Microsoft researchers have developed a technology that writes data into glass with lasers, raising the prospect of robotic libraries full of glass tablets packed with data

Fathers may get postpartum depression at a similar rate to mothers, but it’s often overlooked. At last, the way we diagnose and treat it is improving, for the good of the whole family

Babies in the West commonly lack a gut microbe that is found in infants in other parts of the world, which may be due to differences in their mothers' diets

Running 170 kilometres over mountainous terrain caused people's red blood cells to accumulate more age-related damage than those of less ambitious athletes

A technology that uses a coiled wire to electrify aerosols has boosted snowfall amid a drought in the western US, according to the company developing it, but the results haven't convinced other scientists

An ultrastable laser could enable extremely precise timing and navigation on the moon, and the cold, dark craters near the lunar poles would be the ideal location for it

The evolution of human hands is one of the most important – and overlooked – stories of our origin. Now, new fossil evidence is revealing their pivotal role

A giant virus encodes part of the protein-making toolkit of cells that gives it greater control over its amoeba host, raising questions about how it evolved and how such beings relate to living organisms

Hearing a sound while working on a complex puzzle, and then hearing it again during sleep, helped lucid dreamers better tackle the problem the next day

A mathematical equivalent of a microscope with variable resolution has shed light on why some atoms are exceptionally stable, a riddle that has persisted in nuclear physics for decades

The psychedelic DMT has been linked to improved mental health outcomes before, but now, scientists have shown it reduces depression symptoms more than a placebo when given alongside therapeutic support

The big bang wasn’t the start of everything, but it has been impossible to see what came before. Now a new kind of cosmology is lifting the veil on the beginning of time

Biologists have debated the reason why Homo sapiens evolved a prominent lower jaw, but this unique feature may actually be a by-product of other traits shaped by natural selection