A piece of woolly rhinoceros flesh hidden inside a wolf that died 14,400 years ago has yielded genetic information that improves our understanding of why one of the most iconic megafauna species of the last glacial period went extinct

Some of the world’s biggest megacities are located in river deltas threatened by subsidence due to excessive groundwater extraction and urban expansion, compounding the threat they face from sea-level rise

A decades-long push to identify clear biomarkers for anxiety and depression is at last achieving results

A Chinese application to the International Telecommunications Union suggests plans for the largest satellite mega constellation ever built – but something else might be going on here

An analysis of growth rings in the leg bones of 17 Tyrannosaurus rex individuals reveals that the dinosaurs matured much more slowly than previously thought, and adds to the evidence that they weren't all one species

Easing stress is one of the healthiest pursuits you can embark on this January. Here are some evidence-backed ways to ground yourself in 2026

Construction generates between 10 and 20 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, but cities can slash their climate impact by designing buildings in a more efficient way

A report warns that we may have seriously underestimated the rate of warming, which could damage economic growth

A few extra minutes of sleep per day or an extra half-serving of vegetables with dinner can add a year to our lives, according to an analysis of data from 60,000 people

Clues from studies of ancient plants and animals have helped archaeologists pin down where the last Neanderthals found refuge, says columnist Michael Marshall

Some of climate change's sharpest realities are being felt on small island nations, where extreme weather is claiming homes and triggering displacement. Those able to stay are spearheading inventive adaptation techniques in a bid to secure their future

A study of the hearts of Greenland sharks has found that the long-lived deep-sea predator has massive accumulations of ageing markers, such as severe scarring, but this doesn't appear to affect their health or longevity

Before the Romans captured Pompeii, the famous town was run by the Samnite people – and a dip in their public baths might have been an unpleasant experience

Combining two kinds of quantum computing devices could be just the trick for taking better images of faint, faraway exoplanets

For centuries, the principle of symmetry has guided physicists towards more fundamental truths, but now a slew of shocking findings suggest a far stranger idea from quantum theory could be a deeper driving force

Sexual behaviour among same-sex pairs is common in apes and monkeys, and a wide-ranging analysis suggests it does boost survival

The world’s most powerful supercomputers can now run simulations of billions of neurons, and researchers hope such models will offer unprecedented insights into how our brains work

Mathematicians rely on numbers, but finding words to explain different levels of certainty has stymied everyone from the ancient Greeks to the most famous modern philosophers. Maths columnist Jacob Aron tells the story of how a CIA analyst finally cracked it

Cutting down boreal forest and sinking the felled trees in the depths of the Arctic Ocean could remove up to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year – but it could come at a cost to the Arctic ecosystem

One of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station is undergoing a “medical situation”, forcing NASA to bring the crew home early for the first time ever

Evidence is mounting that specific gut bacteria are linked to sleep conditions, which may open the doors to dietary recommendations aiming to boost the quality of our slumbers

The ice-covered island may be strategically important, but it's unclear that it could be a commercially viable source of minerals and oil in the near future

Calculations show that injecting randomness into a quantum neural network could help it determine properties of quantum objects that are otherwise fundamentally hard to access

A man with auto-brewery syndrome, a rare condition in which gut microbes produce intoxicating levels of alcohol, has been successfully treated with faeces from a super donor

A standard industrial knitting machine has been modified to produce fabrics from tungsten wire coated in gold, which are used to form the dish on the CarbSAR satellite

Tree bark has a total surface area similar to all of the land area on Earth. It is home to a wide range of microbial species unknown to science, and they can either take up or emit gases that have a warming effect on the climate

A preliminary analysis suggests that industrially useful quantum computers designs come with a broad spectrum of energy footprints, including some larger than the most powerful existing supercomputers

Satellite photos show meltwater on the surface of iceberg A23a collecting in an unusual way, which may be a sign that the huge berg is about to break apart

A man’s severe reaction to a tattoo, which made all his hair fall out and destroyed his sweat glands, has reignited concerns about the immune effects of some tattoo inks

A comprehensive review confirms the benefits of exercise for treating depression, even if the exact reasons remain unclear

Drugs like Ozempic have transformed how we treat obesity, but a review of almost 40 studies shows it doesn't take long for people to regain weight if they come off them

After finding success with last year's New Year's resolution, health reporter Grace Wade has grand plans for 2026 – and the science to back them up

With a new 28 Days Later movie and a new Dune, not to mention films from Stephen Spielberg and Ridley Scott, this is shaping up to be a vintage year for sci-fi, says Simon Ings

The Nesin Mathematics Village in western Turkey was dreamed up by award-winning mathematician Ali Nesin to engage his students

We are going to be getting a lot of exciting new information about galaxies in 2026, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who can't wait to see what it can tell us

There is a growing trend to see our relationship with nature as a spiritual thing. This is a mistake, argues Richard Smyth

From Fallout and Gen Z Star Trek to the classic Neuromancer, you will be glued to the TV this year, says TV columnist Bethan Ackerley

The jawbones and vertebrae of a hominin that lived 773,000 years ago have been found in North Africa and could represent a common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans

Most planetary systems contain worlds larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, and the low-density planets around one young star should help us understand how such systems form

You might feel like the days and weeks are slipping by. Here is how one psychologist says you can shift your experience of time

AI models such as ChatGPT and Gemini fail to give adequate advice for 60 per cent of queries relating to women’s health in a test created by medical professionals

Immune cells are most commonly engineered to kill cancers, but now, scientists have shown the technique makes the gut lining of older mice resemble that of younger mice, raising hopes that the same approach could work in people

The earliest acoustic vibrations in the cosmos weren’t exactly sound – they travelled at half the speed of light and there was nobody around to hear them anyway. But Jim Baggott says from the first moments, the universe was singing

The curse of having to remember easily hackable passwords may soon be over, as a new alternative is set to take over in 2026

The benefits of sleep may be more universal than we thought. We know it helps clear waste from the brain in humans, and now it seems that even creatures without brains like ours get similar benefits

An ambitious form of climate modelling aims to pin the blame for disasters – from floods to heatwaves – on specific companies. Is this the tool we need to effectively prosecute the world’s biggest carbon emitters?

For nearly three decades, the International Space Station has been the only destination in low Earth orbit, but that will change this year. Could it be the start of a thriving economy in space?

Modelling suggests both carbon taxes and green subsidies will be necessary to decarbonise the US economy, but the inconsistent policies of successive presidents are the "worst case" scenario

The Prudhoe ice dome disappeared during a warm period 7000 years ago. Global warming could cause similar temperatures by 2100, showing the Greenland ice sheet’s vulnerability

For years, we've thought of autism as lying on a spectrum, but emerging evidence suggests that it comes in several distinct types. The implications for how we support autistic people could be profound

A galaxy cluster in the early universe is 10 times hotter than it ought to be, which may reshape how we think these enormous structures formed

A study of 160 European famines between 1500 and 1800 shows that El Niño weather events led to the onset of some famines and extended the duration of others

A host of new science books are due to hit shelves in January, by authors including Claudia Hammond, Deborah Cohen and Daisy Fancourt

The US government is approving the drug leucovorin to address rising rates of autism, despite limited evidence that it works. This year, results from the largest trial yet should give more insight into its potential

Researchers at Google have used their Willow quantum computer to demonstrate that "quantum contextuality" may be a crucial ingredient for its computational prowess

Big hitter Peter F. Hamilton has a new sci-fi novel out this month – and Booker winner George Saunders ventures into speculative fiction with his latest book, Vigil

An analysis of several experiments aimed at detecting the mysterious neutrino has identified a hint of a crack in the standard model of particle physics

Did Sahelanthropus, which lived 7 million years ago, walk on two legs like a modern human? It's complicated

Astronomers were puzzled by a black hole around 50 million times the mass of the sun with no stars, spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope – now simulations suggest it could be a primordial black hole, something we have never seen before

The New Scientist Book Club has just finished our December read, Iain M. Banks's sci-fi novel The Player of Games - and most of us were fans of this big-thinking Culture tale

The author of the award-winning science fiction novel Annie Bot, the January read for the New Scientist Book Club, on how she created her startling protagonist

In this extract from the award-winning science fiction novel Annie Bot, the January read for the New Scientist Book Club, we are introduced to Sierra Greer's protagonist, a sex robot called Annie

A woman's body has been found to consist of varying proportions of male and female cells because of an extremely rare form of chimerism

Researchers have confirmed the mass of a free-floating planet thanks to a lucky convergence of ground- and space-based telescopes

Chess960 involves shuffling the pieces at the back of the board, and an analysis suggests doing so can increase the complexity of the game to favour white, black or neither player

Olivia Remes, a mental health researcher at the University of Cambridge, says these are the three things everyone should do this New Year to cultivate a more positive mindset

Understanding the chemical properties of a molecule is an inherently quantum problem, making quantum computers a good tool for the job – and we may start seeing this take off in 2026

Astronomers have found a system of three supermassive black holes, all actively feeding, that appear to be combining into a single system – a rare event that will help elucidate the physics of complex mergers

An explorer and a glaciologist are kite-skiing across Antarctica with a ground-penetrating radar to gather data that will help understand the past and future of the ice sheet

In 1892, astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard thought he saw a bright star near Venus, but then it vanished. We may now know why

Reflect Orbital plans to launch thousands of reflective mirrors to produce "sunlight on demand", but researchers are sceptical about whether the reflected light will be enough to generate electricity

After the New START treaty expires in February, there will be no cap on the number of US and Russian nuclear weapons - but some are sceptical about whether the deal actually made the world safer

The BepiColombo mission has been on its way to Mercury since 2018 and will finally start orbiting the planet and taking X-ray images in the second half of 2026

Flocean, a Norwegian company, is set to open the world’s first commercial-scale subsea desalination plant, an approach that could cut the cost and energy used to make seawater drinkable

The price of weight-loss drugs like Wegovy put them out of reach for most people with obesity, but new arrivals and expiring patents should change that this year

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will be launching the Martian Moons eXploration mission next year, which should finally tell us how Mars acquired the moons Phobos and Deimos

Eleven companies are working towards an ambitious goal as part of the US Department of Energy's plan to fast-track the development of advanced nuclear reactor technologies

GLP-1 agonists have already had an outsized influence on society, and with pill versions and more advanced formulations on the horizon, that looks set to continue

Stunning and shocking images from upcoming exhibition Water Pantanal Fire show how this tropical wetland has been hit by wildfires

The science behind why stroking your seedlings actually works. If you’re worried about your seedlings getting long and leggy, try a bit of home thigmomorphogenesis, advises James Wong

Navigating the night sky can have a positive effect on our well-being. This will be the year I learn the constellations, resolves Michael Brooks

Clear out your shelves for a bumper new crop of books by authors including Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Xand Van Tulleken, says culture editor Alison Flood

On the horizon for this year are Ann Leckie's latest, Neil Jordan's debut and more from Adrian Tchaikovsky. Exciting times, says our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson

In the latest in our imagined history of inventions yet to come, Future Chronicles columnist Rowan Hooper reveals how by the 2030s, botanists had worked out how to grow hybridised superplants to help feed the world

Cacio e pepe pasta and boiled eggs were the subjects of meticulous studies aiming to help cooks achieve perfection, but the reimagined recipes weren't always well-received

The warm and fuzzy emotion of kama muta underlies vital feel-good experiences like social connection and feeling part of something bigger. But are you getting enough of it?

A soldier returned from the Sahara desert in 1916 with a wild story about a meteorite that dwarfed all others. Over 100 years of hunting yielded nothing – but now twin brothers think they have solved the puzzle

With a storage capacity of 36 petabytes, a DNA-based cassette tape can hold every song every recorded, and it could be on the market within five years

In 2026, the European Union will start charging a carbon-emissions-based tax on imported goods such as steel, cement and fertilisers – and countries including the UK are likely to follow

Two later-stage trials investigating LSD for treating anxiety are due to conclude in 2026, which could lead to the drug being approved for the common mental health condition

A photon was apparently detected in two places at once in a twist on the classic double-slit experiment, but many physicists didn't accept the results

Some of the world's most advanced robots showed off their skills at tech shows and sporting events, doing everything from cooking shrimp to running half marathons

From vitamin C to your microbiome and mindset, the latest science of immunity is often counterintuitive. Here's how to give your system a fighting chance to overcome infection

The idea that we might be living in a simulated reality has worried us for centuries. Now physicists have found some tantalising clues – and devised an experiment that might reveal the truth

We have long struggled to determine how the first living organisms on Earth came together. Now, surprising evidence hints that poorly understood prions may have been the vital missing ingredient

Quantum theory fails to explain how the reality we experience emerges from the world of particles. A new take on quantum cause and effect could bridge the gap