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?

We will finally begin to untangle Mercury’s mysteries in 2026, as the BepiColombo spacecraft descend into orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet. BepiColombo consists of a pair of spacecraft ...

Around 175,000 years ago, Neanderthals ventured deep inside a cave in what is now France, broke off stalagmites and used them to build mysterious circular structures. Later on, bears moved in and ...

An analysis of ancient human artefacts finds that the container, a simple but critical tool, may have originated 500,000 ...

The rules governing gravity and other laws of nature seem like eternal truths, but cosmologist João Magueijo has always ...

A 500-kilometre-wide object in a similar orbit to Pluto challenges our assumptions about small bodies in the outer solar ...

A long-overlooked writing system from 5000 years ago is still largely undeciphered, but could mark the moment humans first ...

If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic ...

A comprehensive study exploring coffee’s physiological effects finds that some of its benefits are down to polyphenols and ...

A guide to walking, a look at the world’s Google searches and a deep dive into the secrets of our DNA are some of the topics ...

To mark David Attenborough turning 100, New Scientist staff have been set a tricky task: pick your favourite of his many ...

Two quantum computers and two supercomputers teamed up to break the record for the biggest molecule yet to be simulated using ...