Alpine communities face uncertain future after 2025 glacier collapse
Careful slope monitoring prevented mass casualties in the landslide at Blatten, Switzerland, this year, but mountain communities may face a growing risk of disasters ⌘ Read more

How to extend and improve your life by getting more creative
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 ⌘ Read more

How lab-grown lichen could help us to build habitations on Mars
Scientists cultivating partnerships of fungi and algae believe their invention has far-out implications for how we create the buildings of the future ⌘ Read more

Europa’s thick ice may hinder the search for life in its oceans
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 ⌘ Read more

New Scientist changed the UK’s freedom of information laws in 2025
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 ⌘ Read more

The essential guide to proving we’ve found alien life
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? ⌘ Read more

Black hole stars really do exist in the early universe
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 ⌘ Read more

What I’ll be doing to help detox my brain in the new year
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 ⌘ Read more

Putting data centres in space isn’t going to happen any time soon
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 ⌘ Read more

The US beat back bird flu in 2025 – but the battle isn’t over
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 ⌘ Read more

Quantum computers turned out to be more useful than expected in 2025
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 ⌘ Read more

2025 was the year of online safety laws – but do they work?
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 ⌘ Read more

High-achieving adults rarely began as child prodigies
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 ⌘ Read more

Roman soldiers defending Hadrian’s Wall had intestinal parasites
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 ⌘ Read more

Closure of US institute will do immense harm to climate research
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 ⌘ Read more

Sitting by a window may improve blood sugar levels for type 2 diabetes
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 ⌘ Read more

Strange lemon-shaped exoplanet defies the rules of planet formation
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 ⌘ Read more

Chronic fatigue syndrome seems to have a very strong genetic element
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 ⌘ Read more

Cosmology’s Great Debate began a century ago – and is still going
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 ⌘ Read more

Crash clock says satellites in orbit are three days from disaster
Satellites in orbit would begin to collide in a matter of days if they lost manoeuvrability during a solar storm or other outage ⌘ Read more

Saturn’s rings form a giant dusty doughnut encircling the planet
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 ⌘ Read more

Your period may make sport injuries more severe
Professional footballer players who became injured while on their period took longer to recover than when injuries occurred at other times of their menstrual cycle ⌘ Read more

The world will soon be losing 3000 glaciers every year
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 ⌘ Read more

How green hydrogen could power industries from steel-making to farming
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 ⌘ Read more

Some Arctic warming ‘irreversible’ even if we cut atmospheric CO2
Efforts to lower the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere may come too late to prevent long-term changes to the Arctic ⌘ Read more

Mars may once have had a much larger moon
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 ⌘ Read more

Qubits break quantum limit to encode information for longer
Controlling qubits with quantum superpositions allows them to dramatically violate a fundamental limit and encode information for about five times longer during quantum computations ⌘ Read more

New antibiotic could stave off drug-resistant gonorrhoea
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 ⌘ Read more

Disney and OpenAI have made a surprise deal – what happens next?
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 ⌘ Read more

Killer whales and dolphins are ‘being friends’ to hunt salmon together
White-sided dolphins seem to help killer whales “scout” and catch Chinook salmon near Vancouver Island, then eat the leftovers ⌘ Read more

Supposedly distinct psychiatric conditions may have same root causes
People are often diagnosed with multiple neurodivergencies and mental health conditions, but the biggest genetic analysis so far suggests many have shared biological causes ⌘ Read more

Earth and solar system may have been shaped by nearby exploding star
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 ⌘ Read more

Roman occupation of Britain damaged the population’s health
Urban populations in southern Britain experienced a decline in health that lasted for generations after the Romans arrived ⌘ Read more

We may finally know what a healthy gut microbiome looks like
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 ⌘ Read more

Inside the wild experiments physicists would do with zero limits
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 ⌘ Read more

Genetic trick to make mosquitoes malaria resistant passes key test
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 ⌘ Read more

Oldest evidence of fire-lighting comes from early humans in Britain
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 ⌘ Read more

Australia’s social media ban faces challenges and criticism on day one
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 ⌘ Read more

Did ancient humans start farming so they could drink more beer?
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? ⌘ Read more

Dinosaurs like Diplodocus may have been as colourful as birds
Skin fossils from a sauropod dinosaur examined with an electron microscope feature structures called melanosomes, which are similar to those that create the bright colours in birds’ feathers ⌘ Read more