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Astronomers have found a system of three supermassive black holes, all actively feeding, that appear to be combining into a single system – a rare event that will help elucidate the physics of complex mergers

Two later-stage trials investigating LSD for treating anxiety are due to conclude in 2026, which could lead to the drug being approved for the common mental health condition

An explorer and a glaciologist are kite-skiing across Antarctica with a ground-penetrating radar to gather data that will help understand the past and future of the ice sheet

In 1892, astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard thought he saw a bright star near Venus, but then it vanished. We may now know why

Cacio e pepe pasta and boiled eggs were the subjects of meticulous studies aiming to help cooks achieve perfection, but the reimagined recipes weren't always well-received

A soldier returned from the Sahara desert in 1916 with a wild story about a meteorite that dwarfed all others. Over 100 years of hunting yielded nothing – but now twin brothers think they have solved the puzzle

With a storage capacity of 36 petabytes, a DNA-based cassette tape can hold every song every recorded, and it could be on the market within five years

Some of the world's most advanced robots showed off their skills at tech shows and sporting events, doing everything from cooking shrimp to running half marathons

A photon was apparently detected in two places at once in a twist on the classic double-slit experiment, but many physicists didn't accept the results

An analysis of ongoing trials suggests that mRNA cancer vaccines have the potential to deliver health benefits worth $75 billion each year in the US alone

It took 125 years, but in 2025 a team of mathematicians discovered the solution to a long-puzzling problem about the equations that govern the behaviour of particles in a fluid

There is a state of relaxation that few of us spend much time in, but which comes with profound well-being benefits. With healthier ageing, reduced risk of disease and feeling more energised all on offer, here's how to get there

It has been claimed that because most of our DNA is active, it must be important, but now human-plant hybrid cells have been used to show this activity is mostly random noise

The Linac Coherent Light Source in California has been firing record-breaking X-ray pulses for years, but now it’s due for a shutdown and an upgrade. When it is turned back on, it will be even more powerful

The Majorana 1 quantum computer was hailed as a significant breakthrough by Microsoft, but critics say the company has yet to prove it actually works despite a year of debate

From our immune systems to our microbiomes, if you're planning to make health improvements in the new year, having an eye on the numbers can help set you up for success

Three start-ups are aiming to create gene-edited babies. Columnist Michael Le Page has no doubt that editing our offspring will one day become routine, but not like this

Mathematician Katie Steckles explains just why the proliferation of snowflake decorations this time of year is deeply annoying

From mudstones on Mars to strange gases in exoplanet atmospheres, tentative evidence for extraterrestrial life is starting to come thick and fast. But when we've found it, how will we know for sure?

The ideas presented in George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan's The Neural Mind are fascinating, but the writing is far less compelling

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

Somewhere at the edge of mathematics lurks a number so large that it breaks the very foundations of our understanding - and in 2025 we came a step closer to finding it

A village buried by a landslide, the world’s largest tidal bore and the aftermath of ferocious storms and wildfires appear in our pick of images from environment stories this year

Tantalising signs of past microbial life showed up on Mars this year, but to truly know whether they contain the answer to the biggest question in the universe, we will need to bring samples back to Earth

At the Q2B Silicon Valley conference, scientific and business leaders of the quantum computing industry hailed "spectacular" progress being made towards practical devices – but said that challenges remain

The detection of mercurial particles of light emanating from mice led to a flurry of interest in biophotons, a mysterious phenomenon that could have applications in agriculture

Palaeontologists reported some remarkable dinosaur fossils this year, including a Velociraptor relative, a dome-headed pachycephalosaur and one of the most heavily armoured creatures that ever lived

Focusing on the futuristic tech that appears in sci-fi without paying attention to the actual point of the story is a big mistake, says Annalee Newitz

A microscope that cost less than £50 and took under 3 hours to build using a common 3D printer could be transformative for students and researchers with limited funding

The festive season is a period of social connection for many of us, but alone time can be equally enriching, says Thuy-vy Nguyen, principal investigator of the Solitude Lab

Feedback's eyebrows are raised at tech millionaire Bryan Johnson's latest exploits, which involve Grimes, music, and hallucinogenic mushrooms

With the human family tree now more like a hedge and twice as many known moons, Bill Bryson talks to the New Scientist podcast about refreshing his 2003 bestselling book on science

A new theory of "dark photons" attempted to explain a centuries-old experiment in a new way this year, in an effort to change our understanding of the nature of light

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

Astronomers discovered a new moon of Uranus and hundreds of moons around Saturn over the past year, and there may be many more yet to be found

Careful slope monitoring prevented mass casualties in the landslide at Blatten, Switzerland, this year, but mountain communities may face a growing risk of disasters

Growing evidence reveals that creativity is one of the best-kept secrets for boosting your health. From live theatre to a quick crafting break, here’s how to harness the power of art in your everyday life

The year’s most memorable moments from astronomy and space exploration include a double-detonating supernova, a private moon landing and a stunning lunar eclipse

Scientists cultivating partnerships of fungi and algae believe their invention has far-out implications for how we create the buildings of the future

An experimental gene therapy seems to slow the progression of Huntington’s disease by about 75 per cent, and researchers are working to make its complicated delivery much more practical

Ejaculating within 48 hours of providing a sperm sample for IVF seems to lead to greater success rates than abstaining from ejaculation for longer

The liquid ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa appears to be completely sealed off from the planet’s surface, which may reduce the chances of finding life there

By requesting copies of the then-UK technology secretary's ChatGPT logs, New Scientist set a precedent for how freedom of information laws apply to chatbot interactions, helping to hold governments to account

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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