Simulation of the large scale structure of a galaxy cluster Illustris Collaboration/ESO The cosmic web is killing a galaxy. Galaxies can only continue to form stars when they are full of gas, and one dwarf galaxy nearly 100 million light years away is being stripped of its stellar fuel by the enormous web of matter…
From growing smaller leaves to shape-shifting its insides, a desert flowering plant goes all in to flourish in the harshest of conditions. Summer temperatures in Death Valley National Park frequently exceed 50° Celsius (122° Fahrenheit). During that peak heat, most desert plants hope simply to cling to life. Not the Arizona honeysweet (Tidestromia oblongifolia). It…
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Headaches are incredibly common, but they’ve gotten surprisingly little attention from scientists. Here to walk us through what we know—and don’t know—about headache science is Tom Zeller Jr. He’s a former New York Times reporter and editor and the current editor in chief of Undark….
Hackers has gained a cult following in the 30 years since its debut Maximum Film/Alamy Tim BoddyPicture editor, London It is 1995. Geocities, Yahoo! and Netscape are kings of a burgeoning internet. Spending an hour by your screeching dial-up modem on the information superhighway is thrilling. And the film Hackers is released, a psychedelic celebration…
So it’s confession time: I’ve been lying to you. I’ve said on many occasions that our Milky Way galaxy has a flat disk (like in this column or this one). But it’s not really flat—not even for a reasonable definition of the term. Now, in my defense, I wasn’t lying per se; I was simplifying….
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Peekaboo is a delightful game to play with infants. Lacking as they are in object permanence, the act of hiding your face from a baby before revealing it with a flourish is sure to raise a smile, as their little brains try to figure out what on Earth…
November 6, 2025 2 min read A New Map Just Added 60,000 Miles to Ancient Rome’s Roadways New findings increase the known length of the Roman Empire’s road network by more than 60,000 miles By Tom Metcalfe edited by Andrea Thompson The central street of the ancient Roman city of Scythopolis in what is today…
An Amur tiger, also known as a Siberian tiger, tests the waters in Russia Tamim Ridlo/Shutterstock Tigers Between EmpiresJonathan C. Slaght, Allen Lane (UK); Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) The Siberian tiger is an awesome animal, with “cuts of black and washes of orange”, writes conservationist Jonathan Slaght, a roar like “some terrible tide”, at home in the bitter…
November 6, 2025 3 min read AI Decodes Visual Brain Activity—and Writes Captions for It A non-invasive imaging technique can translate scenes in your head into sentences. It could help to reveal how the brain interprets the world By Max Kozlov & Nature magazine Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a non-invasive way to explore brain…
Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Mechanical turk Feedback is a grumpy sort, so we run a mile when faced with any kind of enforced fun. It is possible, therefore, that we would…
