Author: hatman

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Black holes are so strange that physicists have long wondered if they are quite what they seem. Now we are set to find out if they are instead gravastars, fuzzballs or something else entirely

Fermented foods make up a third of what we eat and were mostly discovered by accident centuries ago. Now a fermentation revolution is promising extraordinary new flavours and novel ways to boost gut health

We thought happiness peaked at the beginning and end of life, but a study from Germany suggests a more pessimistic outlook for our later years

Astronomers have long thought the universe should look generally the same in every direction, but an anomaly in the radiation from the big bang persists even after a new analysis from radio telescopes

A star found in the Large Magellanic Cloud is remarkably unpolluted by heavier elements, suggesting it is descended from the universe’s earliest stars

Several species of birds from different continents use and understand similar alarm calls when they see an invader that might lay an egg in their nest – this shared call hints at the origin of language

It was previously thought that children younger than 7 couldn’t find efficient solutions to complex problems, but new research suggests that much earlier, children can happen upon known sorting algorithms used by computer scientists

Sandra Knapp, chair of the judging panel for the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize, explains why neurologist Masud Husain’s collection of case studies is such an enlightening, compassionate book

In this passage from Our Brains, Our Selves, winner of the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize, neuroscientist Masud Husain recounts how novelist Marcel Proust became convinced, wrongly, that he’d had a stroke