After weeks of criticism, Microsoft promised to show new data about its Majorana 1 quantum computer at the biggest meeting of the world's physicists. Researchers in the room tell New Scientist they were not impressed with what they saw.

Recordings of brain activity in budgerigars reveal sets of brain cells that represent different sounds like keys on a keyboard – a structure never seen before in any bird brain

A record-setting test of quantum communication used a microsatellite to connect ground stations in China and South Africa, bringing a global quantum internet closer to reality

String theory may be our best attempt at a theory of everything, except that it can't describe an expanding universe like ours. Now a radical new twist on the idea could finally fix that – but it requires us to completely reimagine reality

The first randomised controlled trial of microdosing LSD as a treatment for ADHD found the psychedelic drug wasn’t any more effective than a placebo in alleviating symptoms

The European Space Agency has released the first batch of large-scale images from the Euclid space telescope, which astronomers have already used to find hundreds of strong gravitational lenses

A World Meteorological Organization report details a long list of grim records for everything from CO2 levels and temperature to sea ice loss and sea level rise

A meteorite discovered in north-west Africa in 2023 didn’t come from a large asteroid or any of the known planets of the solar system – but it might have formed on a planet that was destroyed long ago

Speedy new chargers from Chinese automaker BYD take just 5 minutes to restore 400 kilometres of an electric car’s range

Speedy new chargers from Chinese automaker BYD take just 5 minutes to restore 400 kilometres of an electric car’s range, but will they be widely used?

The finest ever map of the cosmic microwave background - the faint evidence of the universe's early form - has yielded precise confirmation of the age of the cosmos and its rate of expansion. But for some scientists, the findings offer a frustrating lack of clues to major cosmological mysteries

Money is a deeply emotive subject, our attitudes to it vary wildly and we are reluctant to bring it up in conversation. Could new research help us to be less weird about it?

There are a couple potential explanations for distinctive markings found on a Martian rock, but new evidence suggests they are most likely to be related to microbial activity

NASA’s Perseverance rover recorded unusual sounds as a Martian dust devil passed directly over the robotic vehicle in 2021, and we now know they came from electrical activity in the storm

For years, Egyptologists have assumed pyramid tombs were just for the rich – but the burials at a site called Tombos don’t fit this pattern

A new way of estimating rural populations has found that we may be undercounting people who live in these areas, potentially inflating the global population beyond the official count of 8.2 billion - but not everyone agrees

NASA’s InSight lander recorded surprisingly large quakes that indicate Mars is more seismically active than we first thought. Mysteriously, they only happen during Martian summers

Analysing the aftermath of particle collisions has revealed two new instances of “CP violation”, a process that explains why our universe contains more matter than antimatter

Birds do it, chimps do it, even monarch butterflies do it – and by paying more attention to how animals self-medicate, we can find new treatments for ourselves

The wind on Saturn's largest moon is strong enough to blow around rocks of up to half a metre in diameter, which could put NASA's upcoming Dragonfly mission at risk

A private moon mission planned for 2027 will be the first step towards commercial lunar mining of rare and expensive helium-3

Scientists have long sought the particle that carries the force of gravity, but a new theoretical model tosses out that idea entirely – and shows how it could be tested in experiments

The Big Wheel, discovered using the James Webb Space Telescope, formed just 2 billion years after the big bang - surprisingly early for a spiral galaxy of a similar size to our Milky Way

Surveys that ask thousands of people how they spend their time have revealed some surprising activities that seem to make any given day a good one

We may be starting to get a grasp on what kick-started life on Earth – and it could help us search for it on other planets

A newly discovered mechanism could explain the shock finding last year that oxygen is produced by metallic nodules on the seafloor – and it might be happening on other planets, too

Can one single mathematical framework describe the motion of a fluid and the individual particles within it? This question, first asked in 1900, now has a solution that could help us understand the complex behaviour of the atmosphere and ocean.

A failed launch left a batch of Starlink satellites in the wrong orbit last year, and it appears that a fragment of one fell to Earth and hit a farm in Canada. Thankfully, no one was injured

New Scientist's revelation that a UK minister is asking ChatGPT for advice raises the question of what role these new AI tools should play in government – and whether we should really think of them as intelligent

It can be difficult to recall exactly when a specific event happened, and now it seems our memory can be tricked into pushing occurrences back in time, making us think they happened earlier than in reality

In a survey of AI researchers, most say current AI models are unlikely to lead to artificial general intelligence with human-level capabilities, even as companies invest billions of dollars in this goal

These brilliant images show how researchers in Switzerland are using weather-modification techniques to understand how ice crystals form in clouds, an important and poorly understood factor in climate and weather models

An analysis of changes to global ecosystems has revealed that almost nowhere is untouched by the influence of humanity, with more than 50 per cent of the planet's land mass experiencing "novel" conditions

Building the full value of pi has been a project thousands of years in the making, but just how much of this infinite number do we actually need, asks our maths columnist Jacob Aron

Shifting your focus could help you overcome the trickery of optical illusions

The health problems associated with ultra-processed foods may be explained by the way the products encourage overeating. Adding more protein to the foods might help people limit their intake – but it isn’t a complete solution

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it is discontinuing its regular update calls due to staffing problems, but its researchers may also fear political retaliation for discussing climate change

A study of the fossilised fur of six mammals from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods has found they were all greyish-brown in colour, which would have helped them hide from dinosaurs

The 2023 breach of the Kakhovka dam drained a huge reservoir and exposed a vast area of toxic sediment, creating a debate about how best to rebuild after the Russia-Ukraine war

Potential cuts of up to 50 per cent of NASA's science budget could mean cancelling missions including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Voyager probes

Bones dating back 25,000 years suggest that humans lived in extremely icy conditions in Tibet, which were previously thought to be uninhabitable

New Scientist has used freedom of information laws to obtain the ChatGPT records of Peter Kyle, the UK's technology secretary, in what is believed to be a world-first use of such legislation

A mission to survey the results of a deliberate crash between an asteroid and a NASA spacecraft has taken stunning images of Mars and its moon Deimos

To reduce the growing risk of intense wildfires, California is cutting and burning the areas that fuel them – but these efforts may be moving too slowly

NASA’s Perseverance rover found large crystals of quartz with a high purity on Mars, which probably had to have formed in the presence of hot water

Hydrocortisone and testosterone are just two of 13 drugs and supplements that could lessen the impact of genes that accelerate brain ageing

For a long time objective measurement of subjective experience was considered impossible, but it is finally becoming a reality, promising a boost for health care and much more

Few people could write so genially, even humorously, about our existential crisis. Henry Gee can, in his excellent new book The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire

Feedback would like to bring to readers' attention the retraction of five psychology articles by Nicolas Guéguen, including a "field study" into "bust size and hitchhiking"

Whether social media sites police their platforms using humans or algorithms, content moderation isn't keeping users safe, says Jess Brough

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions yet to come – this time how, by the mid-21st century, many people were opting for a "nose job" that would supercharge their sense of smell.

In his Atomic series, artist James Stanford showcases "the spectacle and the horror" of growing up near a nuclear bomb testing site

Cosmic Titans, a new exhibition at the University of Nottingham, UK, is a powerful collaboration of artists and quantum physicists that sets out to make the intangible tangible

The odds are stacked against an all-female robotics team in Rule Breakers, a fantastic film about teaching girls in Afghanistan

Noughts and crosses, or tic-tac-toe, is a simple game – but twist the rules and you can really spice it up, says Peter Rowlett

Bone fragments from a cave in northern Spain suggest there were multiple hominin species living in western Europe around a million years ago

Scientists have struggled to explain why global temperatures have shot up in recent years, but ocean cloud cover has now emerged as a crucial piece of the puzzle

Sheets of bismuth, gallium, indium, tin and lead can now be made just a few atoms thick by crushing them at a high temperature and pressure between two sapphires

As a step towards a useful and ultra-secure quantum internet, researchers have created an operating system that coordinates connected quantum computers, no matter what hardware they use

Radical new insights from the science of interoception – how the body senses its internal state – explain the real reasons we feel tired all the time, and how to re-energise

Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a type of dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease, in 2007 – but an analysis of his Discworld books suggests there were signs of the condition a decade earlier

D-Wave's claim that its quantum computers can solve problems that would take hundreds of years on classical machines have been undermined by two separate research groups showing that even an ordinary laptop can perform similar calculations

Palaeontologists have discovered 66 three-toed dinosaur footprints in a slab of rock that has been on display for 20 years at a school in Queensland

Saturn has dozens of new moons, bringing it to a total of 274. All of the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometres wide, but at what point is a rock too small to be a moon?

Saturn has dozens of new moons, bringing it to a total of 274. All of the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometres wide, but at what point is a rock too small to be a moon?

Analysis of samples brought back to Earth from the asteroid Bennu reveal that it has a bizarre chemical make-up and is unusually magnetic

Farming arose on multiple continents among populations with radically different cultures and environments and with no means of communicating with each other – how did it crop up independently at about the same time?

Linguists, psychologists and experts in cultural evolution are discovering why we tell stories, how ancient the oldest ones are and why some tales run and run

A patch of old oak trees in the UK is helping scientists to predict how the world’s forests will respond to higher levels of carbon dioxide, a crucial question for our future climate

A highly pathogenic strain of bird flu is spreading south along the Antarctic Peninsula and could devastate populations of penguins and other seabirds

Men who had given blood more than 100 times in their life were more likely to have blood cells carrying certain beneficial mutations, suggesting that donating blood promotes the growth of these cells

A cargo ship carrying sodium cyanide collided with a tanker transporting jet fuel – scientists are warning of potentially severe environmental impacts

A 12-passenger “seaglider” that is part boat and part aircraft harnesses Cold War-era technology to fly just above the waves using only electric power

When downed trees are attacked by beetles, the wood becomes more flammable, demonstrating another way insects can alter the risk of wildfires

Quantum fridges, batteries and clocks are brilliant inventions but still limited in power. Now physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern is charting a path to take them to the next level

Some male octopuses tend to get eaten by their sexual partners, but male blue-lined octopuses avoid this fate with help from one of nature’s most potent venoms

What shapes are made by a spinning needle? This seemingly innocent problem has puzzled mathematicians for decades, but now a new proof is being called the biggest result of the current century as it could help solve many other tricky problems

Researchers have criticised Microsoft's new Majorana 1 quantum computer, saying it has made claims about the way it works that aren't fully backed up by scientific evidence