The Best of New Scientist

The time delay between sex and offspring makes identifying the cause and effect a little complicated. Humans have language to explain how reproduction works, but for other animals it may be far less…

For the first time plants have been recorded making sounds when stressed. The sounds differed when they were injured or thirsty, a finding that could help farmers

We’ve been ravaging the planet’s ecosystems for too long, but crucial decisions this year could be the turning point that help us restore our relationship with nature

The brain processes voices differently depending on the volume of the speaker and if the listener is focused on them

Researchers have identified a brain pathway in mice that governs the development of opioid tolerance. If the same exists in humans, treatments that inhibit it could prevent opioid addiction

Are carbs good for you? Or eggs? Every week seems to bring contradictory new diet advice. New Scientist unpicks the surprising flaws in nutritional science

A much-needed new kind of antibiotic can kill bacteria such as MRSA and works in a way that makes it extremely difficult for resistance to evolve

Maximum lifespan is not rising in step with average lifespan. It could be that the human body has innate limits that prevent most getting any older than 115

What we call laws of physics are often just mathematical descriptions of some part of nature. Ultimate physical laws probably don't exist and physics is all the better for it, says theoretical…

This simulation models a huge number of atoms in detail with the help of artificial intelligence

Researchers at Microsoft say they have created elusive quasiparticles called Majorana zero modes – but scientists outside the company are sceptical

A fluxonium qubit can keep its most useful quantum properties for about 1.48 milliseconds, drastically longer than similar qubits currently favoured by the quantum computing industry

[tbc] The record for the maximum human lifespan has stayed unbroken since the 1990s but that might change, according to a new way of analysing mortality records

A phenomenon called cosmological time dilation means that events taking place in the early universe seem to evolve slower than those today

You are not the person you were as a child, or even last year. The discovery that our characters change is unnerving, but embrace it and it can be empowering

The orthodoxy in most high income countries is that anyone with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or more is overweight, but evidence suggests the cut-off point should be a fair bit higher, writes Clare…

Frustrated with the Australian government’s inaction on climate change, software king Mike Cannon-Brookes is trying to buy several big coal plants so he can shut them down in favour of renewables

A long spell of extreme hot and dry weather is affecting energy, water supplies and food production across China

Inspired by experiments showing entanglement over time, not just space, physicist Vlatko Vedral is reconsidering the way we think of time in quantum mechanics. The new approach treats space and time…

The influential scientist talks about his Earth-as-superorganism hypothesis and predicts a new era for humanity, unfettered by the constraints of our bodies

Splitting data into a spectrum of colour packets has enabled a single computer chip to transmit a record 1.84 petabits of data per second via a fibre-optic cable