Friends who blow hot and cold put more strain on your physical and mental health than enemies. Here's how to spot them and handle them

What life is and how the mind works fall within the compass of one bold concept. But critics say that by attempting to explain everything, it may end up explaining nothing

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

The systems we use to produce food have many problems, from horrifying waste to their dependence on fossil fuels. Vaclav Smil explains how to fix them

Most ingredients touted as the key to better health fail to live up to the hype but fibre bucks this trend, with benefits for the whole body, not just the gut

The health benefits of fermented food and drink have long been touted, but firm evidence in favour of kombucha, sauerkraut and kefir is surprisingly elusive

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

Claudia de Rham thinks that gravitons, hypothetical particles thought to carry gravity, have mass. If she’s right, we can expect to see “rainbows” in ripples in space-time

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

To capture the clearest and most direct images of a “Wigner crystal”, a structure made entirely of electrons, researchers used a special kind of microscope and two pieces of graphene unusually free of imperfections

In the 1920s, Erwin Schrödinger wrote an equation that predicts how particles-turned-waves should behave. Now, researchers are perfectly recreating those predictions in the lab

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

A practical superconductor would transform the efficiency of electronics. After decades of hunting, several key breakthroughs are inching us very close to this coveted prize

It should be possible to combine several quantum states, each with almost no energy, to create a single quantum state containing unexpectedly energy-rich regions

Through science, we are striving for objective knowledge about the universe around us. But physicists increasingly believe achieving this will never be possible

Almost all the stars that will ever exist have already been born, and they have been around long enough for life to evolve on planets that orbit them

Photographer Enrico Sacchetti captures the power and potential of ITER, an international nuclear fusion experiment currently under construction in southern France

In the quantum realm, a particle’s properties can be separate from the particle itself, including its angular momentum – which could require a rethinking of fundamental laws

An experiment to test distant particles’ ability to correlate their behaviour is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that classical ideas about reality are incorrect

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

Physicists have demonstrated a bizarre cooling effect by setting up a detector to record the absence of photons in a laser experiment

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

If gravity is a truly quantum entity, something as simple as measuring the strength of an object’s gravitational field should change its quantum state

Alan Turing's theories about computation seem to have a startling consequence, placing hard limits on how fast or slow any physical process in the universe can grow

A surprising reversal of our usual understanding of the second law of thermodynamics shows that it may be possible for heat to move in the “wrong” direction, flowing from a cold area to a warm one

Droplets of fluid have been known to hover above a hot surface, but a new experiment suggests the same can happen to tiny jets of liquid too

Launching a million tonnes of moon dust around Earth could dim sunlight across our planet by 1.8 per cent. This would reduce the global temperature, but whether it would be worth the resources, and the risks involved in such a strategy, are unclear

Tiny pieces of stone found in a rock formation in Western Australia may be the oldest evidence of a meteorite impact on Earth, dating back nearly 3.5 billion years

Carbon emissions within the next 50 years could lead to a tipping point where large parts of the Greenland ice sheet melt over the next 10,000 years

The eruption of the Shiveluch volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia on 11 April sent plumes of volcanic ash many kilometres into the air and could affect flights

A well in Nebraska is the first in the world to have been drilled in search of naturally occurring geologic hydrogen, but tests to determine how much of the gas it might supply are on hold because of a broken pump

Semi-mythical "earthquake lights" may be accompanied by changes to Earth's magnetic field. Now researchers say these changes could be used to forecast major tremors

The second series of this show about Earth 66 million years ago is a joy to watch - but it inspires more than it informs. A little more science would have been nice

An oil company in China has started drilling a hole that would be the deepest in the country and among the deepest in the world

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

Climate researchers thought that current global average sea levels were the highest in more than 100,000 years, but new models suggest oceans just 6000 years ago may have been higher than at the beginning of the industrial revolution, and possibly even higher than today

Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, the largest lake in South America, has been captured in detail by the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission

Once seen as miraculous, these days ice is no longer extraordinary. But in a winter season when Antarctic sea ice hit a historic low, it is clear we should cherish it more, says Max Leonard

A drilling project in the Taklamakan desert is aiming to reach more than 11,000 metres below Earth’s surface as China explores the deep earth for resources

Photographer Matjaz Krivic has been charting the effects of lithium mining on locals in the world's largest salt flat in Bolivia since 2016

The Kikai-Akahoya eruption of an underwater volcano off the coast of Japan ejected enough material to fill Lake Tahoe twice, three times as much as the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815

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

A documentary film about three young survivors of super-typhoon Odette, a tropical cyclone that hit the Philippines in 2021, wins the New Scientist Editors Award at Earth Photo 2024

Endurance sank beneath the ice during Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Antarctic expedition. More than a hundred years later, researchers document their own saga of how they found the vessel

China's carbon emissions may have peaked in 2023, as figures suggest its output has plateaued so far in 2024

Asteroids that regularly fly between Earth, Venus and Mars could provide radiation shielding for human missions to explore neighbouring planets

Most ingredients touted as the key to better health fail to live up to the hype but fibre bucks this trend, with benefits for the whole body, not just the gut

Fewer lakes are freezing over each winter compared with past years, posing environmental and economic consequences around the world

The infinite monkey theorem states that illiterate primates could write great literature with enough time, but the amount of time needed is much longer than the lifespan of the universe