The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
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Why did humans decide they weren't like other animals, or animals at all? Has this exceptionalism twisted us out of shape? Michael Bond's book Animate offers a page-turning account of where we are now
Scientific disciplines often shy away from asking fundamental "what if" questions. But philosophy – if unencumbered by dogma or ideology – has much to offer evidence-based enquiry
Rowan Hooper met ecologist Suzanne Simard under an oak tree in Kew Gardens, London, to talk about her new book, criticism of her work, and getting a call from James Cameron's people
Feedback, prone to fixations, is pleased to learn this is an issue that also applies to AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which had to be sternly ordered to stop mentioning gremlins and the like
Asteroid 2026JH2 has enough mass to wipe out a city and will zoom past Earth next week
After a career spent grappling with the neural underpinnings of autism, Uta Frith is unwavering in her controversial call to scrap our current view of the condition and start again
Six teeth roughly 400,000 years old have yielded some of the first ancient proteins thought to belong to Homo erectus, providing molecular clues to their relationships with other hominins
Genetically altered bacteria can synthesise gadusol, a naturally occurring compound found in zebrafish eggs that could be developed as an alternative to existing sunscreen products that can harm marine life
Government departments and other public bodies in the UK must consider requests to release information about AI-produced content, regulators have confirmed. The move follows a successful request by New Scientist for the release of a minister's ChatGPT logs
We’ve long tried to control the weather by engineering rainfall. Now such cloud-seeding efforts are escalating, creating conflict between countries and stoking conspiracy theories. But do they work?
Carbon credits bought by companies to offset their emissions really have reduced deforestation, but not by as much as credit developers claim, according to a rigorous analysis
PCOS will now be known as PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome), and for Alice Klein, who has the condition, it's been a long time coming
The concept of a field plays a key role in particle physics, but what exactly is it? From its origins in the study of magnetism to the quantum fields of today, columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein goes exploring
Gases collected from boiling mineral springs in Zambia contain the chemical signature of having come directly from the Earth’s mantle, a sign of a rupture in the tectonic plates and the possible beginning of a new continental boundary
An analysis of ancient human artefacts finds that the container, a simple but critical tool, may have originated 500,000 years ago. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how slings, ostrich eggs and wooden trays helped our ancestors survive
A US start-up is putting autonomous data centres in the ocean, powered by wave energy, but experts warn that the harsh environment could make maintenance challenging
The rules governing gravity and other laws of nature seem like eternal truths, but cosmologist João Magueijo has always questioned their origins. Now, he has a bold new proposal
Genetic analysis of 1039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and the Norman conquest highlights the impact of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the island’s ancestry
Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system
If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic intervention – building a 130-kilometre-wide dam between the US and Russia
The US Department of Defense has released hundreds of documents and photographs related to UFOs, some of which have been declassified, in the first of many drops to come
Many flowering plants have duplicated genomes, which could have helped them evolve to deal with extreme stress in times of environmental upheaval
A drone has crashed in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, causing a fire that has spread to 12 square kilometres of land. Dry weather, strong winds and the presence of land mines are complicating efforts to bring the blaze under control
Satellite measurements show that in the early 2010s sea level rise suddenly accelerated to a rate of 4.1 millimetres per year, possibly in response to an increase in the rate of global warming