From colonialism to AI, this Booker-longlisted novel urges us to wake up to how we treat wild creatures and places

The natural motors that power tail-like appendages in bacteria seem to have a single evolutionary origin, allowing parts from different species to be combined to create a tiny new engine

Rival tribes of bacteria armed with poison darts are fighting it out in your gut, with armies of traitors often winning the day

An analysis of thousands of cognitive tests carried out by chimpanzees finds that the number of spectators influenced their performance in different ways depending on the difficulty of the task

Experiments show that illuminating the underside of a decoy seal reduces attacks by great white sharks, revealing a possible strategy to protect surfers and swimmers

Strange solids called temporal metamaterials finally make it possible to investigate the controversial idea of quantum friction – and push special relativity to its limits

More and more parents are choosing to only have one child. Here’s what the evidence says about how growing up without siblings affects their personality traits and well-being

From artificial retinas to ageing mice, here are five of the most promising results from research performed on the ISS – and what they might mean for humans on Earth and in space

We instinctively know that relaxing feels good, but we are now figuring out what it does to the brain and uncovering the best ways to unwind to maximise its benefits

Many fear that voters are being manipulated by political campaigns that use Facebook ads, TikTok and YouTube videos, but research reveals a more surprising story

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

Physicists finally know whether black holes destroy the information contained in infalling matter. The problem is that the answer hasn’t lit the way to a new understanding of space-time

Our metabolism's response to food is highly idiosyncratic and there are hints that tailoring our diet to these personal differences can deliver health benefits

From nuclear strikes to giant spikes, discover the systems in place to prevent a collision and test your decision-making to see if you could avoid a catastrophic impact

A super-stretchy hydrogel can stretch to 15 times its original length and return to its initial shape, and could be used to make soft inflatable robots

A new equation shows a surprisingly simple relationship between pressure and the temperature needed to melt any solid substance into a liquid

Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist Peter Higgs has died aged 94. He proposed the particle that gives other particles mass – now named the Higgs boson and discovered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012

The physicist Peter Higgs quietly revolutionised quantum field theory, then lived long enough to see the discovery of the Higgs boson he theorised. Despite receiving a Nobel prize, he remained in some ways as elusive as the particle that shares his name

We can’t stir ordinary solids, but one research team now claims to have stirred an extraordinary quantum “supersolid”, generating tiny vortices

Cosmological puzzles are tempting astronomers to rethink our simple picture of the universe – and ask whether dark matter is even stranger than we thought

The quantum principle of superposition – the idea of particles being in multiple places at once – could help make quantum batteries that charge within minutes

Physicists have coaxed a cloud of atoms into having a temperature beyond absolute zero and placed them in a geometric structure that could produce an unknown form of matter

Strange solids called temporal metamaterials finally make it possible to investigate the controversial idea of quantum friction – and push special relativity to its limits

A technique to charge a battery inside a quantum computer relies on sorting qubits in an imitation of Maxwell’s demon, a 19th-century thought experiment once thought to break the laws of physics

ITER, a €20 billion nuclear fusion reactor under construction in France, will now not switch on until 2035 - a delay of 10 years. With smaller commercial fusion efforts on the rise, is it worth continuing with this gargantuan project?

An experiment with a robot and gelatine determined that 65-micrometre-thick paper is the most prone to slicing our skin – but it can also make for a handy recyclable knife

A subatomic particle called the muon caused waves when its experimental behaviour didn't align with a prediction based on the standard model. A new calculation might resolve the discrepancy – but some particle physicists are sceptical

Experiments in a wind tunnel have revealed why the sling action bowling technique made famous by Sri Lankan cricketer Lasith Malinga is so effective at hoodwinking whoever is batting

Smashing gold nuclei together at high speeds billions of times has resulted in 16 particles of antihyperhydrogen-4, a very exotic and heavy form of antimatter

In an experiment simulating what happens deep in the interiors of planets, scientists have found that liquid can be compressed into ice crystals – even at extremely high temperatures

The hunt for particles of dark matter has been stymied once again, with physicists placing constraints on this mysterious substance that are 5 times tighter than the previous best

Atoms tunnelling through a quantum battery could charge it and also keep it from losing energy, which could give an advantage over conventional batteries

Particles of light can spend "negative time" passing through a cloud of extremely cold atoms – without breaking the laws of physics

The symbols and mathematical operations used in the laws of physics follow a pattern that could reveal something fundamental about the universe

Physicists finally know whether black holes destroy the information contained in infalling matter. The problem is that the answer hasn’t lit the way to a new understanding of space-time

Simulations suggest that when a quantum battery shares a quantum state with the device it is powering, the device can gain more charge than was stored in the battery to begin with

Light can be directed and steered around bends using a method similar to the way clouds scatter photons, which could lead to advances in medical imaging, cooling systems and even nuclear reactors

Allowing for moves that create quantum superpositions makes a quantum version of a Rubik’s cube incredibly complex, but not impossible to solve

Changes in the distribution of groundwater around the planet between 1993 and 2010 were enough to make Earth's poles drift by 80 centimetres

Chris Packham's new BBC series, Earth, looks at significant moments in Earth's history, including anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss, "It's not a sixth mass extinction event that we're precipitating," he says, "it's a mass extermination event"

The destruction of telecommunications cables during the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano in 2022 shows that underwater debris currents can travel at 122 kilometres per hour

The Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago filled the sky with fine silicate dust, which blocked out sunlight and lingered for 15 years

Scientific bodies are due to make an official decision in the coming year about whether to declare a new geochronological unit precipitated by the impact of humans on Earth

Several enormous craters left by explosions have been spotted in Siberia over the past 15 years, and a new explanation links them to hot gas – and climate change

An ocean research vessel has just discovered four underwater mountains, the tallest almost 3 kilometres high, that might be hotspots of deep-sea life

Microbes that rapidly convert CO2 to rock could lock away the greenhouse gas in deep underground storage sites, such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs

Mysterious green sunsets were reported after the massive eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 – now simulations show how they were created and just how rare they are

The Luna structure, a 1.8-kilometre-wide depression in north-west India, may have been caused by the largest meteorite to strike Earth in the past 50,000 years

Climate change is making extreme cold upwellings more common in certain regions of the world, and these events can be catastrophic for animals such as bull sharks

For decades, planetary scientists have been trying to understand the origins of two colossal geological anomalies inside our planet. New insights suggest they could be leftovers from a cosmic collision