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Taking vitamin D2 supplements seems to reduce levels of vitamin D3 in our body

Chimpanzees are consuming significant levels of alcohol from their diet of ripe fruit and the finding may help explain the origins of humans’ taste for alcohol

There are more centenarians now than ever before. But more must be done to address inequalities that prevent people from having a realistic chance of hitting this milestone.

A fossil from about 108 million years ago reveals an early member of the pachycephalosaurs, a group of dinosaurs with bizarre protrusions on their skulls that may have been used in combat

Using a suction device to stretch the skin seems to increase its permeability and stimulate immune cells, which could allow vaccines to be administered topically

While most countries have seen a steady decline in suicide rates, the United States has witnessed the opposite, with suicides jumping almost 30 per cent since 2000

It’s not just diet and exercise that governs how well you age. Your mindset, social connections and sense of purpose make a big difference, and it’s never too late to start working on them

An asteroid called 2023 CX1 underwent a single explosion, hinting that it had an unusual structure that might be more damaging on the ground

Tech millionaire turned longevity pioneer Bryan Johnson devotes more than 6 hours a day to trialling different methods to turn back the clock. Can the rest of us learn anything from his radical approach?

Many of us know people who live into their 90s, but hardly anyone makes it to 100. Studies are now revealing that factors that really make a difference

A set of 29 stone tools, including blades and points for hunting, butchering and cutting wood, were found neatly arranged as if carried in a leather pouch that decayed

Half a decade since the arrival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we're still learning about its complications, with the latest research suggesting that long covid may disrupt menstrual periods

Evidence shows that eating a longevity diet can dramatically lengthen your lifespan – and the sooner you start, the more of a difference it makes

To be truly fit in older age, you need to work on specific aspects of your fitness – and research shows that it’s never too late to reap the benefits

Our friendly – and not so friendly – gut bacteria lie at the core of healthy ageing. Research is now revealing what it takes to maintain a youthful microbiome

AI tools including Perplexity and Open AI’s GPT-4 often provide one-sided answers to contentious questions, and don’t back up their arguments with reliable sources

Trapping ultracold atoms with laser light let researchers magnify and then image the wave functions of atoms that were previously too close together to look like anything but a blob

Inflammation is a vital part of the immune response, but it seems that the system can sometimes go awry, resulting in chronic inflammation that has been linked to conditions such as cancer

Trial participants who received an increased weekly dose of Wegovy lost 19 per cent of their body weight in a year on average, but also saw a higher risk of painful skin sensations and nausea

Experiments on Earth indicate some common species of bacteria and fungi could survive for several days on the moon's surface, suggesting missions must take stronger precautions to avoid contamination

For at least 10,000 years, humans across South-East Asia were being carefully preserved after death by being smoke-dried – a tradition that continues to this day in some cultures

The UK government has announced a raft of tiny nuclear power projects, while Russia, China and a host of tech giants are also betting big on small nuclear reactor designs. Does the idea make sense and can they really be built any time soon?

While Mars today only has a wispy remnant of an atmosphere, it may once have had one hundreds of times thicker with a pressure three times that on Earth

Chamkaur Ghag is on a mission to find the 85 per cent of the universe’s matter that we haven’t yet identified. He details his hopes for the major scientific experiment – and what the future could hold

For women going through perimenopause, there is no shortage of advice on how to deal with the symptoms – but which strategies show real results, and which are social media hype?

A strange kind of geometry governs how particles move inside matter. Now, for the first time, physicists have uncovered its full shape – and it could transform how we design materials

The global health and economic benefits of covid-19 vaccines came to between $5 trillion and $38 trillion in their first year, showing an incredible return on investment

As drones have risen to prominence on the battlefield, so too has electronic warfare, in which adversaries attempt to mask, jam or trace radio signals. Now, a new stealthy radio device could help give people the edge, letting them fly drones without detection

Changes in rock formations from before and after the mass extinction event 66 million years ago may reflect how dinosaurs acted as ecosystem engineers, shaping vegetation and even the meandering of rivers

There are three key nutrients that all plants need – nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium – but in different amounts. So finding fertiliser that suits all your plants might seem tricky, but there is a simple solution, says James Wong

After fifty years of books, games and movies, what more could the Aliens franchise deliver? An inventive TV show, with fresh monsters and new heroes, finds our TV critic Bethan Ackerley

Cleaning up air pollution has saved millions of lives, but it has also given us an inadvertent taste of a nightmare climate scenario. The race is on to understand how bad it could be – and how to swerve the worst effects

Photographer Nicole Tung captures the tough world facing South-East Asia’s fishers and their families in this series of images, which won her the Carmignac Photojournalism Award for fieldwork

A 1.3-kilometre swim by a jaguar is the longest ever confirmed, but the cat's motives for making the journey are unclear

Constant loss of smell, facial pain and a blocked nose are a reality for the 10 per cent of people living with chronic rhinosinusitis, a disease long-neglected by research. Targeting the nasal microbiome, though, is offering hope

Childhood obesity rates have surpassed those of undernutrition for the first time, suggesting efforts to combat malnutrition will have to shift gears.

A study of festivalgoers suggests that drinking beer and sharing a bed makes you more attractive to mosquitoes

The gas giant has been measured for the first time in decades, trimming 8 kilometres from its diameter

By combining the information storage capabilities of DNA with a design inspired by a cassette tape, researchers have created a storage medium that can hold 36 petabytes of data

Not only are children starting puberty earlier, they face a digital world where, for good and bad, most of their interactions are internalised. How We Grow Up is scary, illuminating and hopeful, says Chris Simms

Astronomers have struggled to explain why a long and thin cloud forms above Mars’s Arsia Mons volcano each year, until now

Ancient remains from a cave in Serbia show that Neanderthals were hunting mountain goats 300,000 years ago, adding to evidence of their ability to adapt to different environments

A hidden world of quantum metrologists ensure that everyday devices perform safely and correctly, but their work is never done

There is growing opposition to environmental policies around the world, but could researchers have found a way around this, asks Graham Lawton

An exceptionally loud collision between two black holes has been detected by the LIGO gravitational wave observatory, enabling physicists to test a theorem postulated by Stephen Hawking in 1971

The planet TRAPPIST-1e lies in its star’s Goldilocks zone, where water remains liquid – and an analysis suggests it might have a nitrogen-rich atmosphere like Earth’s

Feedback remembers Godzilla, and feels a little nervous about the wasp nest found at an old nuclear weapons site in South Carolina

An archaeological dig in northern England shows iron and lead processing continued and even increased after the departure of the Romans

Our first attempt at shifting the orbit of an asteroid has provided crucial insight into how we could safely deflect a space rock that was hurtling towards Earth

Diagnosing mental health conditions like anxiety and depression can be difficult, but it turns out that your nose could help doctors understand when you are feeling the strain, says Gillian Forrester

We know fermented foods do us good, but the ZOE founder's new book still surprises with fascinating facts - and avoids feeling like an ad for his gut supplements, says Helen Thomson

A mix of three antibodies seems to protect mice against several strains of influenza and could one day be useful against seasonal flu or pandemics

Next to the flashy realm of AI, materials may seem quaint. But new quantum research could yield revolutionary breakthroughs, with the power to transform our world

Most human populations evolved to cope with low or high local levels of micronutrients such as zinc, but these localised adaptations might now be problematic

A rock found last year on the surface of Mars offered tantalising evidence that life once existed on the Red Planet. Now scientists have found yet more evidence that could point to the existence of ancient organisms – but we can't know for certain without returning samples to Earth

A part of the brain that is about the size of a sunflower seed in people could play a big role in our food consumption

Samples retrieved from asteroid Ryugu indicate that it once had flowing water in far greater volumes than previously thought possible, suggesting that similar objects may have played a role in delivering vast quantities of water to Earth

It has long been claimed that only one mammal – the golden mole – has fur that shimmers with rainbow colours, but it now turns out that at least a dozen more mammals have iridescent fur too

An estimate that as many as 1.3 million wildebeest move across the Serengeti Mara landscape each year has been cut down to size using AI

Some cosmic events could have profoundly altered the lives of our ancient human relatives. Did Neanderthals go extinct, at least in part, due to changes in Earth’s magnetic field? Did Australopithecus witness huge meteorite impacts?

A review of the five main methods proposed for cooling down the poles or slowing the loss of ice concludes they are all wildly impractical, wouldn't work, or both

The arguments made by AI safety researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies are superficially appealing but fatally flawed, says Jacob Aron

People who made the greatest gains in muscle power over eight weeks of resistance training also improved the balance of bacteria in their gut

Florida may soon become the first state to end all vaccine mandates, including those for schoolchildren, setting the stage for deadly infections to make a comeback

A carved figure found in northern France, dated to 27,000 years ago, may reflect how hair was styled in a culture that disappeared during the last glacial maximum

A device made from superconducting qubits could prove a powerful technology for enabling practical quantum computing or more experimental propositions like quantum machine learning

From stock market prices to house numbers, certain collections of numbers aren't as random as you'd think, says Katie Steckles

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) uses lasers and mirrors to look for black holes across the universe, and it turns out a Google DeepMind AI could make it even more sensitive

From flexible implants to circuits seeded with living cells, a new kind of electronics is starting to produce long-lasting implants with the potential to help everything from paralysis to hearing and vision loss

Not only is solar more than capable of supplying all the world’s energy, in the long term it is the only power source that won’t fry the planet

When it was first published in 1984, William Gibson's Neuromancer transformed sci-fi and instantly birthed the cyberpunk genre. Ahead of an upcoming TV adaptation, Emily H. Wilson revisits the prophetic novel to see if it stands the test of time

That the human mind treads a delicate line between order and disorder is a radical idea that’s gaining traction - and is changing our understanding of intelligence, consciousness and creativity

Surprising discoveries about the species responsible for 90 per cent of mushroom-related deaths is revealing the fungi kingdom to be even stranger than we had thought

You can feast guilt-free on farmed oysters and mussels as their production can have environmental benefits – but those probably don't include capturing carbon

A possible galaxy named Capotauro may have formed within 90 million years of the big bang – but astronomers can’t be sure that’s what it is

Two fossils found in Germany show very young pterodactyls with arm bones thought to have been broken in flight, probably because of severe tropical cyclones

A biodegradable glue that encourages bones to repair themselves can be applied during surgery using a hot glue gun, potentially offering a cheap and quick way to treat injuries

An experimental new method for extracting lithium from brine and even seawater promises to be more sustainable than existing methods

About half of people with generalised anxiety disorder don’t respond to common treatments with antidepressants – but psychedelics may offer relief

Flamingoes, a kingfisher and two red-crowned cranes are shown in all their glory in these images from the new book Aviary: The bird in contemporary photography

L-theanine supplements are touted for stress relief, focus and better sleep. Although the evidence so far is preliminary, studies suggest the compound may have several brain benefits

During his time as a Meta executive, Nick Clegg witnessed some of the biggest decisions to ever affect the online world. But this collection of tired tropes offers little insight, says Chris Stokel-Walker

A prototype of bifocal eyeglasses uses liquid crystals and electric fields to switch between modes that aid in nearby and distance vision

Seeking endorsements for her new book, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein finds herself staring at fundamental questions of space, time – and grammar

Four new species of aquatic birds related to modern penguins have been described from fossils found in New Zealand, showing how these creatures flourished around 60 million years ago

Societies can be united and inspired by ideas of the future. We urgently need more of them, argues futurist Sarah Housley

Scientists have mapped the activity that takes place across a mouse's entire brain as it decides how to complete a task - and the results could explain the origin of our gut feelings

In Love's Labour, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws on 40 years of conversations with his patients about relationships. This compelling memoir is reminiscent of the writing of Oliver Sacks, says David Robson

An analysis of a range of dry dog foods finds that none are nutritionally complete, but vegan and vegetarian foods compare well with meat-based ones

People seem to spend longer on the toilet if they use a smartphone while sitting there – and all that scrolling may be boosting their likelihood of getting haemorrhoids

Governments are looking to ban social media for children but can't get enough of AI – a technology parents are far less equipped to deal with

As quantum computers get larger, they may become truly useful – 3D-printing a key component of some quantum computers may make it easier to build larger arrays of qubits to make them more powerful

Storing carbon dioxide underground is seen as a way to mitigate climate change, but the world could run out of safe storage space within 200 years if we keep on burning fossil fuels

Bizarrely, Iberian harvester ant queens lay eggs that turn into male builder harvester ants, and some of her offspring are hybrids of the two species

Being vaccinated against hepatitis B may reduce chronic inflammation levels in the body, which could help ward off diabetes

The drug rapamycin has been linked to a longer life and we're starting to understand how it might have this effect

Scrap cars could be used to build new electric vehicles thanks to a new process for turning various aluminium alloys into a strong and mouldable metal

From “trenfluencers” to complex drug regimens, influencers are reshaping how millions approach steroid use. Now, researchers are trying to catch up with what this means for our health

The discovery that a small blue blob of neurons, the locus coeruleus, controls your mode of thinking suggests ways to increase learning, creativity, focus and alertness

People who do several very short bouts of strenuous activity each day are much less likely to die in the next few years than those who do no exercise at all