In this extract from the February read for the New Scientist Book Club, we meet the protagonist of Tim Winton’s Juice, driving across a scorched landscape in a future version of Australia ...

In the early 1800s, Denmark’s government, medical community, church leaders and school teachers all united to promote the new smallpox vaccine, which led to a remarkably quick elimination of the disea ...

Members of the New Scientist Book Club give their take on Sierra Greer's award-winning science-fiction novel Annie Bot, our read for February – and the needle swings wildly from positive to negative ...

A reanalysis of twin data from Denmark and Sweden suggests that how long we live now depends roughly equally on the genes we ...

Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are at the forefront of a health revolution. Originally used to treat diabetes, then obesity, these GLP-1 receptor agonists – drugs that mimic a hormone that reduces ...

Interval cancers are aggressive tumours that grow during the interval after someone has been screened for cancer and before ...

The New Scientist Book Club's February read is Tim Winton's novel Juice, set in a future Australia that is so hot it is almost unliveable. Here, the author lays out his reasons for writing it – and wh ...

Shrinking sea ice has made life harder for polar bears in many parts of the Arctic, but the population in Svalbard seems to ...

Adults with kidney cancer who received faecal microbiota transplants on top of their existing drugs did better than those who ...

Elizabeth Hohmann is very interested in faeces, and spends her days sifting through stools to find those that could make the biggest difference to other people's health ...

Even given a set of possible quantum states for our cosmos, it's impossible for us to determine which one of them is correct ...

The ubiquitous Epstein-Barr virus is increasingly being linked to conditions like multiple sclerosis and lupus. But why do ...