South Australia has built huge solar farms like this one in in Port Augusta Brook Mitchell/Getty Images As South Australia gets close to its goal of running purely on solar and wind energy, its electricity prices have dropped by a third in a year and are now the lowest in Australia. The state serves as…
The droppings of Peruvian pelicans and Peruvian boobies have been prized for hundreds of years Biljana Aljinovic/Alamy Powerful fertiliser based on seabird droppings may have fuelled the rise of a Peruvian agricultural kingdom 900 years ago and helped drive its eventual takeover by the Incas. Chemical analyses of ancient maize cobs from southern Peru show…
The ancestors of the British Bell Beaker people lived in a wetland area and relied heavily on fishing SHEILA TERRY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Analysis of ancient DNA has uncovered the origins of a mysterious group who appeared in Britain around 2400 BC and, in a century or less, all but replaced the people who built Stonehenge….
Ryan Wills for New Scientist Richard Branson, Jane Goodall and Edward Norton might seem like strange bedfellows. But in 2012, at the Earth Summit in Brazil, they stood together on stage making the case that putting a price tag on nature was the only sensible way to prevent its destruction. Goodall, who spent decades studying…
The gene therapy is administered as a mist that is inhaled Nico De Pasquale Photography/Getty Images A first-of-its-kind inhalable gene therapy for lung cancer that genetically modifies people’s lung cells has been fast-tracked towards potential approval after promising clinical trial results. “Very encouragingly, the hypothesis was proven – that there was actually shrinkage of the…
You might expect a cognitive psychoanalyst, former NHS mental health lead and author of How to Be Your Own Therapist and Addicted to Anxiety, to offer fairly familiar advice to anyone struggling with anxiety. Yet Owen O’Kane’s view is refreshingly different. Rather than seeing anxiety as something to eliminate, he argues that it is something…
What separates a good idea from a bad one? It isn’t always easy to tell. Take the invention of vaccination, for example. Drawing pus from a woman infected with cowpox and injecting it into an 8-year-old boy seems utterly reckless, but in doing so, 18th-century physician Edward Jenner found a way to fight the deadly…
The lunar X, seen from Tokyo in February 2025 The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images/Alamy The first time I took a photograph of the moon through my telescope was almost a decade ago. It was a very amateur set-up. I held up my phone camera to the eyepiece and after capturing a dozen fuzzy images,…
Many mushroom species produce the psychoactive compound psilocybin YARphotographer/Shutterstock Magic mushrooms have been giving humans mind-altering experiences for thousands of years, but the real reason fungi evolved these hallucinogenic chemicals may have been as a bioweapon against insects that feed on them. Psilocybin is the active ingredient in numerous species of magic mushrooms, which are…
A long-exposure photograph in the northern hemisphere showing satellites in the night sky Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images A report filed by SpaceX with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late December reveals some startling information – including that its Starlink satellites had to perform about 300,000 collision-avoidance manoeuvres in 2025. Starlink…
