Annie Bot by Sierra Greer is winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for the best science fiction novel of the year “Come to bed, Mouse. I know how to cheer you up,” he says. “I’m not brooding,” Annie says. “You sure?” “Fairly sure.” She is fresh from her shower, rubbing lotion into her legs….
Sahelanthropus fossils (centre) compared with a chimpanzee (left) and a human (right) Wiliams et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eadv0130 A long-running and bitterly fought dispute over whether the earliest known hominin had a knuckle-walking gait, like chimpanzees, or walked upright, like humans, may have been settled – but not everyone is convinced. Scott Williams at…
January 2, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Earliest Human Ancestor May Have Walked on Two Legs A fossil belonging to an ancient hominin that lived seven million years ago bears the hallmarks of bipedalism, according to a new study By Cody Cottier edited by Claire Cameron Wiliams et al., Sci. Adv….
Annie Bot is literally programmed to please her owner Doug Leon Steele/Millennium Images, UK Not being a sex robot myself, I had to take an imaginative leap to write from the perspective of Annie in my novel Annie Bot. Because the book is written in the third person, not the first, Annie isn’t a narrator…
At its heart, science is about the joy of discovery — extending the boundaries of what we know and learning more about the world and our place in it. Research over the last year was no exception, delighting us with the silly to the profound. So take a minute to savor 2025’s smattering of scientific…
January 1, 2026 4 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm The Pleiades Star Cluster Has a Secret Stellar Family Scattered across the Milky Way The “Seven Sisters” of the Pleiades are part of a much larger complex that can help reveal our galaxy’s deep history By Phil Plait edited by Lee Billings A view…
Primordial black holes are hypothesised to have formed shortly after the big bang Shutterstock/Mohd. Afuza An unusually massive black hole in the very early universe may be a kind of exotic, star-less black hole first theorised by Stephen Hawking. In August, Boyuan Liu at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues spotted a strange galaxy…
In the classic American folktale The Little Engine That Could, a small blue locomotive laboriously chugs up a hill hauling cars stuffed full of toys and food for children on the other side. The train engine wills herself up the steep incline by chanting: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I…
January 2, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm How Woodpeckers Turn Their Entire Bodies into Pecking Machines These birds’ drilling approach is more like extreme tennis playing than weight lifting By Rohini Subrahmanyam edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Tapping woodpeckers harness their muscles more like tennis players than like weight lifters. Diana…
The Book Club has been reading Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images The New Scientist Book Club moved from the dystopian near-future imagined by Grace Chan in Every Version of You in November to the utopian far-future imagined by Iain M. Banks in The Player of Games for our…
