New Scientist

New Scientist covers the latest developments in science and technology that will impact your world. New Scientist employs and commissions the best writers in their fields from all over the world. Our editorial team provide cutting-edge news, award-winning features and reports, written in concise and clear language that puts discoveries and advances in the context of everyday life today and in the future.

The political spectrum • Efforts to further our understanding of autism aren’t helped by partisan views

New Scientist

Californians battle the king tide

A step closer to solving ancient mystery • Did the earliest known hominin, which lived 7 million years ago, walk on two legs like a modern human? It’s complicated, finds James Woodford

Gargantuan black hole may be a remnant from the dawn of the universe

We share our sleeping patterns with jellyfish

CAR T-cell therapy makes ageing guts heal themselves

Mass of a rogue exoplanet measured for the first time

A crack in our view of the universe • An analysis of several experiments aimed at detecting the mysterious neutrino might have broken the standard model of particle physics, finds Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Murder victim had two sets of DNA • A woman’s body has been found to consist of varying proportions of male and female cells because of an extremely rare form of chimerism, discovers Michael Le Page

‘Missing’ star is found again after 130 years

US will need carrots and sticks to reach net zero

Most of our genome really is junk • Human-plant hybrid cells have been used to show how our DNA activity is mostly just random noise, reports Michael Le Page

Is it checkmate for the standard version of chess?

El Niño linked to famines in early modern Europe

mRNA cancer vaccines worth billions in US alone

Inside the world’s ultimate X-ray machine • The record-breaking, behemoth is about to get an upgrade that will double the energy of its X-rays. Karmela Padavic-Callaghan paid it a visit

The duo kite-skiing across Antarctica • An explorer and a glaciologist are travelling across Antarctica with a ground-penetrating radar to gather data that will help us understand the past and future of the ice sheet, reports Alec Luhn

A strange kind of quantumness may be key to quantum computers’ success

Three supermassive black holes seen smashing together

Our true nature • There is a growing trend to see our relationship with nature as a spiritual thing. This is a mistake, argues Richard Smyth

Field notes from space-time • The year of the galaxy We are going to be getting a lot of exciting new information about galaxies in 2026, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who can’t wait to see what it can tell us

It takes a village

Watch out for 2026’s top TV • From Fallout and Gen Z Star Trek to the classic Neuromancer via Green Planet II, you will be glued to the TV this year, says Bethan Ackerley

The lowdown on this year’s top TV documentaries

A vintage year for sci-fi films • With a new Dune, a Ridley Scott movie and even a Steven Spielberg film in the offing, Simon Ings is looking forward to what’s heading our way in 2026

Your letters

End of the spectrum? • We have long thought of autism as lying on a spectrum, but emerging evidence suggests there may be several distinct types, finds Michael Marshall

Two ways to understand autism • The idea of an autism spectrum, where autistic people have similar traits only to a greater or lesser extent (below left), is challenged by studies that find that autism may come in multiple distinct forms. These subtypes have more in common with the “colour wheel” picture of autism (below right), which plots the extent to which an autistic person...