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

Astronomers thought they had seen the "first hints of life on an alien world" this year, but they disappeared under closer scrutiny

Mysterious ‘little red dots’ seen by the James Webb Space Telescope can be explained by a new kind of black hole enshrouded in an enormous ball of glowing gas

We have only just started to understand how our brains clean themselves, but columnist Helen Thomson finds promising evidence for how to boost this process

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to try FreeBSD on a laptop, take note – 2025 has brought transformative changes. The Foundation’s ambitious Laptop Support & Usability Project is systematically addressing the gaps that have held FreeBSD back on modern laptop hardware.  The project started in 2024 Q4 and covers areas including Wi-Fi, graphics, audio, installer, and sleep states.

From massive solar panels to the difficulty of staying cool - not to mention high-energy radiation - there are a lot of engineering problems that need to be solved before we can build data centres in space

After starting the year with its first known bird flu death, the US expanded its efforts to contain the virus, which enabled it to end its public health emergency response months later

Rapid advances in the kind of problems that quantum computers can tackle suggest that they are closer than ever to becoming useful tools of scientific discovery

New laws in the UK, Australia and France were brought in during 2025 with the aim of protecting children from harmful content online, but experts remain divided on whether they will achieve this goal

It's easy to assume that the most talented adults among us were once gifted children, but it turns out that talent during childhood is no guide to later success

Excavations of sewer drains at a Roman fort in northern England have revealed the presence of several parasites that can cause debilitating illness in humans

If Excel rules the world, Word rules the legal profession. Jordan Bryan published a great article explaining why this is the case, and why this is unlikely to change any time soon, no matter how many people from the technology world think they can change this reality.

In 1979, VisiCalc was released for the Apple II, and to this day, many consider it the very first spreadsheet program. Considering just how important spreadsheets have become since then – Excel rules the world – the first spreadsheet program is definitely an interesting topic to dive into.

Jamie Zawinski, one of the founders of Netscape and later Mozilla, has dug up the original versions of the iconic Mozilla dinosaur logos, and posted them online in all their glory. While he strongly believes Mozilla owned these logos outright, and that they were released as open source in 1998 or 1999, he can’t technically prove that.

A pair of nascent planets have been caught smashing together around the nearby star Fomalhaut, and in doing so have solved the puzzle of its famous ‘planet’

The National Center for Atmospheric Research has played a leading role in providing data, modelling and supercomputing to researchers around the world – but the Trump administration is set to shut it down

Our cells follow 24-hour circadian rhythms that regulate our blood sugar levels and are heavily influenced by light exposure. Scientists have harnessed this to show that just sitting by a window improves blood sugar control in people with type 2 diabetes

Mark Weiser has written a really interesting article about just how desirable new computing environments, like VR, “AI” agents, and so on, really are. On the topic of “AI” agents, he writes: Take intelligent agents.

A distant world with carbon in its atmosphere and extraordinarily high temperatures is unlike any other planet we’ve seen, and it’s unclear how it could have formed

The largest study so far into the genetics of chronic fatigue syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis, has implicated 259 genes – six times more than those identified just four months ago

Our understanding of the true nature of the cosmos relies on measurements of its expansion, but cosmologists have been arguing back and forth about it for more than 100 years

In recent years, things have not been going well for Mozilla. Firefox’s market share is a rounding error, and financially, the company is effectively entirely dependent on free money from Google for making it the default search engine in Firefox.

Satellites in orbit would begin to collide in a matter of days if they lost manoeuvrability during a solar storm or other outage

The rings of Saturn are normally thought to be flat, but measurements by the Cassini spacecraft show that some of their particles fly hundreds of thousands of kilometres above and below the thin main discs

Professional football players who became injured while on their period took longer to recover than when injuries occurred at other times of their menstrual cycle

Under current climate policies, 79 per cent of the world’s glaciers will disappear by 2100, endangering the water supply for 2 billion people and raising sea levels dramatically

Many industries are eyeing up hydrogen as a source of clean energy, but with supplies of green hydrogen limited, we should prioritise the areas where it could have the most positive impact on carbon emissions, say researchers

Efforts to lower the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere may come too late to prevent long-term changes to the Arctic

There are two small moons in orbit around Mars today, but both may be remnants of a much larger moon that had enough of a gravitational pull to drive tides in the Red Planet's lost lakes and seas

Controlling qubits with quantum superpositions allows them to dramatically violate a fundamental limit and encode information for about five times longer during quantum computations

Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the microbe responsible for gonorrhoea, is developing resistance to most antibiotics, which means we need new drugs to treat the condition. An antibiotic called zoliflodacin might be part of a solution

In a stunning reversal, Disney has changed tack with regard to safeguarding its copyrighted characters from incorporation into AI tools – perhaps a sign that no one can stem the tide of AI

White-sided dolphins seem to help killer whales "scout" and catch Chinook salmon near Vancouver Island, then eat the leftovers

People are often diagnosed with multiple neurodivergencies and mental health conditions, but the biggest genetic analysis so far suggests many have shared biological causes

A new explanation for the solar system's radioactive elements suggests Earth-like planets might be found orbiting up to 50 per cent of sun-like stars

Urban populations in southern Britain experienced a decline in health that lasted for generations after the Romans arrived

The world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide is on the cusp of a turning point that could herald the beginning of a global decline in fossil fuel use

This Changes Everything columnist Annalee Newitz on how AI-generated content went mainstream in 2025

Biologists poured cold water on Colossal Biosciences’ claim to have brought the dire wolf back from extinction, and some worry the overblown headlines will undermine conservation work

Our visual highlights from the animal world this year include a mouse caring for its companion, dolphins communicating in an unexpected way and a colossal squid caught on camera for the first time

Big AI firms have built their models by hoovering up copyrighted material from the internet as training data. They say this is legal, but copyright holders disagree - and this year they hit back in a major way

The first Denisovan skull, an ancient hunter’s toolkit and a Roman man’s brain that has turned to glass: here are our picks of the year’s most striking findings about prehistoric humans

Scientists found a way to let people perceive an intense blue-green hue unlike anything they had seen before – and the technique could help people with colour blindness

The Trump administration has targeted everything from public health to space missions for funding cuts, bringing an end to the longstanding US policy of scientific pursuits as a path towards progress and economic prosperity

A bizarre Christmas dinner invitation, some mysterious carol singers and even a spot of charades. Can you solve all 12 of our unique festive riddles?

We knew that GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy did more than just help control type 2 diabetes and aid weight loss, but the extent of that potential really came to light in 2025

Three thought experiments involving “demons” have haunted physics for centuries. What should we make of them today?

A building-sized asteroid had a 1-in-32 chance of hitting Earth at its peak, but astronomers soon found there was zero chance of it impacting the planet

Though there were setbacks on climate change and funding for science this year, there was still plenty of amazing discoveries to marvel at

There are a host of celestial events to get excited about next year – including a total solar eclipse. Abigail Beall is lining up her calendar

Scientist and photographer Felice Frankel has zoomed in on everyday occurrences with her camera for her new book, Phenomenal Moments, which reveals the hidden science in our daily lives

Neuroscience columnist Helen Thomson on how she discovered a host of evidence-based ways to keep her brain healthier in 2026

Feedback has spent some time sifting through 2025's key scientific achievements to come up with a range of weird and wonderful (and less wonderful) winners for our inaugural Backsies awards

Our gut microbiome has a huge influence on our overall health, but we haven't been clear on the specific bacteria with good versus bad effects. Now, a study of more than 34,000 people is shedding light on what a healthy gut microbiome actually consists of

From a particle smasher encircling the moon to an “impossible” laser, five scientists reveal the experiments they would run in a world powered purely by imagination

The rollout of a type of genetic technology called a gene drive for tackling malaria could be edging closer after a lab study supports its success

An excavation in Suffolk, UK, has uncovered pyrite and flint that appear to have been used by ancient humans to light fires some 400,000 years ago

From bonobos and rats to tickling robots, research is finally cracking the secrets of why we’re ticklish, and what that reveals about our brains

As Australian teenagers lose access to social media, observers say there are still many unknown questions about the ban, which came into force on 10 December

For centuries, Europeans thought that eternal daylight saturated the cosmos. The shift to a dark universe has had a profound psychological impact upon us

New evidence suggests that alcohol was a surprisingly big motivator in our monumental transition from hunting and gathering to farming – but was beer really more important to us than bread?

Skin fossils from a sauropod dinosaur examined with an electron microscope feature structures called melanosomes, which are similar to those that create the bright colours in birds' feathers

From an incredible series of revelations about the ancient humans called Denisovans to surprising discoveries about tool making, this year has given us a clearer picture of how and why humans evolved to be so different from other primates

Scientists were amazed to discover a 507-year-old clam that was already 100 in Shakespeare’s day, but why did it live so long and what can we learn from it?

Excavations of a workshop that was buried in Pompeii almost 2000 years ago have given archaeologists unique insights into Roman construction techniques and the longevity of the empire’s concrete

Our writers and contributors have chosen their favourite ever science-y books, films, TV shows, music, video games, board games and more to see you through the festive period

The time of day that cancer drugs are administered could make a big difference to a patient's outcomes, and would be a relatively simple intervention to roll out

How a Finnish physicist named Karl Lemström once became obsessed with recreating the aurora borealis from scratch – and may have ended up creating something even more intriguing

From machine learning to voting, the workings of the world demand randomisation, but true sources of randomness are surprisingly hard to find. Now quantum mechanics has supplied the answer

Mean temperatures this year approached 1.5°C above the preindustrial average, making it the second hottest year after 2024

Some of the elements used by living systems are far more abundant in Cassiopeia A than we thought, hinting that some parts of our galaxy might be more suitable for life than others

Screen time has been linked to all sorts of problems, from depression and obesity to poor sleep. But how worried should you really be? Jacob Aron sifts through the evidence

A hybrid grolar bear saga is unfolding in the Arctic, and the tale of this strange family has much to tell us about nature on our changing planet

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