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For decades, autistic women and girls have had to play "diagnostic bingo" before getting their true diagnosis. As new neuroscience offers a fresh understanding of the condition, the time for change is now

A more precise definition of the second is crucial to all sorts of physical measurements – but to get there, scientists have to pack up their extraordinarily fragile optical clocks and take them on tour

A company in the Netherlands says it has perfected a way to create "graft chimeras" with the skin of one plant and the innards of another

From robot rights to ageing and climate change, this month’s science fiction squares up to the big topics, with new titles from authors including Nick Harkaway and Eve Smith

Squeezing exercise into one or two days a week seems to have similar health benefits as doing the same amount of physical activity spread out throughout the week

A termination letter obtained by New Scientist reveals that the Trump administration has gutted the office that runs the country’s only nationwide survey on drug use and mental health

The concept of nothing once sparked a 1000-year-long war, today it might explain dark energy and nothingness even has the potential to destroy the universe, explains physicist Antonio Padilla

Under pressure from Elon Musk’s DOGE task force, NASA is cancelling grants and contracts for everything from lunar dust research to educational programmes

Even animals with very small brains turn out to have cultural traditions, which poses a puzzler for biologists wondering what makes human culture unique

As semaglutide-based weight loss treatments such as Ozempic and Wegovy become more popular, new side effects are emerging – and one is hair loss

Urine that has sat in the sun for a while seems to fertilise crops while warding off pests, without affecting the produce's taste

At the Dakshineswar temple complex in India, Hanuman langurs beg for food by grabbing visitors’ legs or tugging on their clothes – and they don’t stop until they get their favourite snacks

After a container ship struck and destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, researchers began calculating the risks of similar catastrophic incidents for other US bridges – and they’re surprisingly high

Cave-dwelling orb spiders have adapted their webs so they act as tripwires for prey that crawl on the walls of the caves

By studying the brains of autistic girls, we now know the condition presents differently in them than in boys, suggesting that huge numbers of women have gone undiagnosed

An eavesdropper hiding inside a black hole could still obtain information about quantum objects on its outside, a finding that reveals how effectively black holes destroy the quantum states near their event horizons

Paranthropus was an ape-like hominin that survived alongside early humans for more than a million years. A fossilised leg belonging to a strikingly small member of the group raises questions about how it did so

The rate at which the planet is warming has sped up since 2010, and now researchers say that China's efforts to clean up air pollution are inadvertently responsible for the majority of this extra warming

Taking aspirin was first linked to a lower risk of colorectal cancer in 1988, but the research into its anti-tumour potential has been full of twists and turns since then

Since the second world war, US economic prosperity and major technological developments have hinged upon the government’s commitment to funding scientific research. The Trump administration is ending that