New Scientist

Music appears to be made from the same simple building blocks of pitches and chords around the world, upending the prevailing view that universals don’t exist

Yesterday, New Scientist broke the news that suspended animation has been tried on humans for the first time. Helen Thomson answers all your questions on this new procedure

Minerals containing water can exist at much higher pressures than we knew, so they could be hiding oceans’ worth of water deep within giant planets

Can DNA analysis help prospective parents choose IVF embryos on the basis of future intelligence? A study suggests this approach would have little, if any, effect

A colony of ants survived for years in an old nuclear bunker despite having no obvious food source – probably because the ants began eating one another

A UK team was surprised to find that, in the past six years, a glacier in the Antarctic has virtually paused thinning at its end, but a neighbouring glacier hasn't

Conventional wisdom says that one human year is the equivalent of seven dog years, but a new analysis suggests we’ve been getting this all wrong

Around 40 per cent of women in a survey experienced phantom fetal kicks, which is the feeling of a kicking fetus years after giving birth

A portable artificial kidney set has been used successfully by 15 people, and could free them from regular haemodialysis sessions

A molecule in male fruit fly semen boosts females’ long-term memory – the first example of mating playing a role in cognition

Most oil palms in Colombia are planted on land previously used for grazing cattle, rather than land cleared of rainforests, making it a greener choice

A third of plant species in tropical Africa are potentially threatened with becoming extinct, which would put a huge strain on local populations

A synthetic skin could help add the sensation of touch to prosthetic hands or give video games a more realistic feel

The particle physics discoveries have dried up but in politically uncertain times CERN's cooperative model is an example to the world, says its chief Fabiola Gianotti

The idea that super-addictive foods are being engineered by corporate giants is a pervasive one. But trying to find science on this isn’t straightforward, says James Wong

Two of the brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, are in conjuction this week, meaning they appear to line up with Earth in the sky. Here's how to spot them

Genetically modified golden rice finally seems set for approval where it is needed to address vitamin A deficiency, but anti-scientific misinformation campaigns continue, says Michael Le Page

Pigeons with broken wing bones could take to the skies again once their fracture was set using lightweight splints made from dog or sheep bones

A year after the world learned that the first-ever gene-edited children had been born in China, doctors and ethicists are looking at how to proceed safely and responsibly

Bitcoin mining may have released 17 megatonnes of CO2 in 2018, similar to the annual emissions from Estonia and just one-third of an earlier emission estimate