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We are getting a clearer sense of where and how often Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, and it turns out the behaviour was much more common than we first thought

To eliminate bedtime struggles, a growing number of parents have turned to melatonin gummies, but these hormone supplements are largely unregulated. Columnist Alice Klein digs into the evidence on the risks of regularly using melatonin as a sleep aid for children

Gene-editing citrus fruits to make them less bitter could not only encourage more people to eat them, it might also help save the industry from a devastating plague  

Readers are spoiled for choice when it comes to popular science reading this month, with new titles by major names including Maggie Aderin and Michael Pollan

Columnist Michael Le Page delves into a catalogue of hundreds of potentially beneficial gene mutations and variants that is popular with transhumanists

Some people don’t develop dementia despite showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease in their brain, and we're starting to understand why

Reports suggest that Elon Musk is eyeing up a merger involving SpaceX, Tesla and xAI, but what does he hope to achieve by consolidating his business empire?

Yawning and deep breathing each have different effects on the movement of fluids in the brain, and each of us may have a distinct yawning "signature"

We pick the sci-fi novels we’re most looking forward to reading this month, from a new Brandon Sanderson to the latest from Makana Yamamoto

In the early 1800s, Denmark’s government, medical community, church leaders and school teachers all united to promote the new smallpox vaccine, which led to a remarkably quick elimination of the disease in the capital

Members of the New Scientist Book Club give their take on Sierra Greer's award-winning science-fiction novel Annie Bot, our read for February – and the needle swings wildly from positive to negative

In this extract from the February read for the New Scientist Book Club, we meet the protagonist of Tim Winton’s Juice, driving across a scorched landscape in a future version of Australia

The New Scientist Book Club's February read is Tim Winton's novel Juice, set in a future Australia that is so hot it is almost unliveable. Here, the author lays out his reasons for writing it – and why he doesn't see it as dystopian

Elizabeth Hohmann is very interested in faeces, and spends her days sifting through stools to find those that could make the biggest difference to other people's health

Interval cancers are aggressive tumours that grow during the interval after someone has been screened for cancer and before they are screened again, and AI seems to be able to identify them at an early stage

A reanalysis of twin data from Denmark and Sweden suggests that how long we live now depends roughly equally on the genes we inherit, and on where we live and what we do

Shrinking sea ice has made life harder for polar bears in many parts of the Arctic, but the population in Svalbard seems to be thriving

Adults with kidney cancer who received faecal microbiota transplants on top of their existing drugs did better than those who had placebo transplants as their add-on intervention

Even given a set of possible quantum states for our cosmos, it's impossible for us to determine which one of them is correct

Many countries are debating whether to follow Australia and ban social media for younger teenagers. But with more robust evidence on its harms coming, we shouldn't be too hasty