New Scientist

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is sending back stunning images as it explores an ancient river delta in Jezero crater for signs of life

Increasing numbers of space launches will put more black carbon high in the atmosphere, where it can trap heat from the sun

An animal rights group says that an elephant in the Bronx Zoo in New York is so intelligent she should be granted legal personhood, but a court has now issued a ruling saying otherwise

Alan Turing first proposed a test for machine intelligence in 1950, but now researchers at Google and their partners have created a suite of 204 tests to replace it, covering subjects such as mathematics, linguistics and chess

When cats lick and chew catnip or silver vine plants, higher levels of insect-repelling iridoid chemicals are released

Hundreds of genetic variants may influence your risk of becoming severely ill with covid-19, a discovery that could lead to more targeted treatments or even tests that assess a person's likelihood of complications

China’s Chang’e 5 mission landed on the moon in 2020 and sent back samples of dust and rocks, which have been found to contain water – but not very much of it

The toad-headed agama can unfold colourful skin flaps at the corners of its mouth to produce a vibrant display, but a study suggests this behaviour hasn’t evolved to impress mates – it may actually help to startle predators

The UK may invest in its own space plans if Brexit-related issues continue to prevent full involvement in the European Union’s programmes

A 2000-generation experiment with bacteria suggests existing variation makes a smaller contribution to evolution than we had thought

Lyme disease is becoming increasingly common across the world, with warming temperatures one possible culprit for ticks spreading to new regions

An AI tool has spotted subtle evidence of changes in flint tools that indicate ancient humans had cooking fires at a 1-million-year-old archaeological site in Israel

A robotic arm with an attached microphone learned to locate objects in a bag based on the sound they make, including a ring of keys and a bag of crisps

Some smokers lose their cravings after experiencing damage to specific parts of the brain, suggesting these areas form a network that somehow fuels the habit

A major policy paper fails to address big health and environmental issues it was supposed to tackle, such as how to enable the diet changes needed to reach net zero

Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, has claimed that the firm's LaMDA artificial intelligence is sentient, but the expert consensus is that this is not the case

The European Space Agency has released a new tranche of data from its Gaia space observatory, and it could help us rewind the path of stars to see the history of the Milky Way

Tests in mice show that it is possible to switch off a gene in liver cells for at least 220 days, which should lower cholesterol and cut the risk of heart disease

Our grey matter can be over 2°C warmer than the rest of our body, with the highest temperatures reached by women’s brains in the second half of the menstrual cycle

Hundreds of thousands of lithium atoms cooled to near absolute zero exhibit a strange quantum effect a bit like a boomerang