New Scientist Feed

Surveys before, early on in and towards the end of the covid-19 pandemic suggest that although older people's well-being dipped in 2020, it increased once virus-related restrictions in England were lifted

Critics have been calling for NASA to cancel its extremely pricey Space Launch System rocket for ages, but now that it seems to be facing the axe from Elon Musk’s government efficiency task force, it may be time to think again

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is tasked with developing standards for encryption that can protect against quantum computers, may be at risk

The debate over when consciousness arises has been revitalised by new tests of awareness in infants – raising the possibility that it emerges just before birth

Australopithecus came before us, but that doesn't tell us which specific individual species is our ancestor. The fossil record is spotty in places, but the latest finds could give us enough clues to pin down how we are linked

The results of a year-long survey suggest that people in the US are warming up to artificial intelligence, potentially due to marketing and the engaging way AI chatbots respond to human users

Fears that other nations could gain an advantage are holding back the development of quantum computers, with export controls and other restrictions making it harder for researchers to work across borders

John Preskill has been guiding the growing quantum computing industry for decades, and now he has set a new challenge – to build a device capable of a million quantum operations per second, or a megaquop

Hundreds of quantum computing firms around the world are racing to commercialise these once-exotic devices, but the jury is still out on who is going to pull ahead and produce a machine that actually does something useful

With an investment of AU$1 billion, PsiQuantum is planning to build a photonic quantum computer with a million qubits, far larger than any in existence today - and the firm says it will be ready in just two years

Not everyone responds to statins, the standard treatment for people at risk of cardiovascular disease, so an alternative based on genetically engineered immune cells could help prevent arteries from becoming blocked with plaque

Stripping carbon dioxide out of the ocean could be much more efficient than capturing it from the air. Researchers are hoping to show its potential at a pilot plant in Weymouth

When the experimental XB-1 aircraft achieved supersonic speeds on a test flight, it did not create a disruptive sonic boom – thanks to a physics phenomenon called the Mach cutoff

If asteroid 2024 YR4 does smash down on the lunar surface, the explosion might be visible from Earth and would leave a new crater on the near side of the moon

Although the climate goals set by the Paris Agreement are based on the long-term average temperature, one year of high temperatures might be a sign that the 1.5°C threshold has already been reached

Seismic waves suggest the planet's solid inner core is being pulled out of shape – and it has undergone these changes over just a few decades

Unexpected epochs of stillness that punctuate the cosmic timeline could offer a natural explanation for dark matter and many other unsolved astronomical mysteries

A rocky planet less than half the mass of Earth seems to have an atmosphere made almost entirely of sulphur dioxide – this could be due to a huge amount of volcanic activity

There are many theories about how dynamics in the early solar system led to the cosmic neighbourhood we now inhabit, but beyond computer simulations, direct evidence to support them is hard to come by – that's where meteorites come in

Clothes and fishing nets that are made of nylon often end up in landfill or dumped in oceans, but a new way to break down the plastic could improve recycling