The Best of New Scientist

Robots have been roaming Google offices for two years, attempting to separate recyclable items from waste in bins and can now do it with 84 per cent accuracy

An experimental update to Ethereum, the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency, has led to a dramatic reduction in the energy used to secure the currency and verify transactions

Augmenting the artificial intelligence GPT-4 with extra chemistry knowledge made it much better at planning chemistry experiments, but it refused to make heroin or sarin gas

Unrealistic fantasies of the apocalypse are everywhere, but focusing on a potentially disastrous future stops us from making solid plans, says Annalee Newitz

The writers' strike was initially about compensation in an era of streaming services. Now the role of AI has also become a major point of contention in negotiations between the Writers Guild of…

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

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

Brain organoids grown in a lab can be used to perform basic computation tasks, but there are big unanswered questions about how far this approach should be taken

The microbes that live inside you say more than your genes do about your likelihood of developing health conditions ranging from asthma to cancer and schizophrenia

Postbiotics are the newest gut health trend promising to improve our skin, boost our strength and even reverse signs of ageing. But what are they and do they live up to the hype?

[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

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

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

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…

General relativity is one of two pillars of modern physics – our working theory of gravity and of the very large, of planets, galaxies and the universe as a whole

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

A new metal alloy keeps its flexibility and strength after high doses of radiation, making it potentially useful for building spacecraft or Mars colonies

Launching a million tonnes of moon dust around Earth could dim sunlight across our planet by 1.8 per cent. This would reduce the global temperature, but whether it would be worth the resources, and…

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