Babies born prematurely can have language difficulties later in life, but a simple intervention could help BSIP SA/Alamy Playing recordings of a mother’s voice to premature babies may help their brains mature faster, according to the first randomised-controlled trial of this simple intervention. This approach could ultimately improve language outcomes for babies born too early….
October 13, 2025 3 min read Coral Die-Off Marks Earth’s First Climate ‘Tipping Point’, Scientists Say A surge in global temperatures has caused widespread coral reef bleaching and death around the world By Jeff Tollefson & Nature magazine Vast expanses of coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have died as a result of extremely high…
October 12, 2025 3 min read SpaceX’s Starship Succeeds in Final Test Flight of 2025 With the successful eleventh test flight of its Starship megarocket, SpaceX is on the cusp of a new era in spaceflight By Lee Billings A Starship rocket looms behind a SpaceX sign at the company’s Starbase launch facility in South…
This orange dot is a gamma-ray burst that seems to be a sign of an unusual event ESO/A. Levan, A. Martin-Carrillo et al. A black hole that was eaten by a star seems to have gotten revenge by consuming the star from the inside, producing a gamma-ray burst spotted about 9 billion light-years from Earth….
October 13, 2025 2 min read Scientists Map Microbiome Hidden Deep inside Tree Trunks Trees’ inner heartwood harbors methane-producing microbes adapted to oxygen-poor swamps and cow guts By Saugat Bolakhe edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Darrell Gulin/Getty Images Scientists have mapped microbe populations in human guts, deep-sea ecosystems and even clouds. Yet the microbial communities…
I am standing in the bathroom with a strip of litmus paper in my hand. I am going to pee on it and hope that it doesn’t turn red, which would indicate acid. This isn’t for a bet – it is a (ahem) litmus test of whether my diet is slowly killing me. Acidic urine…
In 2006 immunologist and 2025 Nobel prize winner Shimon Sakaguchi co-wrote an article in Scientific American that now feels prophetic. In the story, entitled “Peacekeepers of the Immune System,” Sakaguchi traced a time line of important studies that led to his discovery of an elusive type of immune cell he called regulatory T cells. In…
The way you speak to a chatbot may be more important than you think Oscar Wong/Getty Images Talking to an AI chatbot in less formal language, as many people do, reduces the accuracy of its responses – suggesting that either we need to be linguistically stricter when using a chatbot, or that the AIs need…
Even in retirement, the space shuttle Discovery exudes power, seen across a hangar crowded with planes and jets at its museum home in Chantilly, Va. Charred and worn from its record 39 missions to space, the stalwart of NASA’s shuttle fleet evokes awe in its one-million-plus visitors every year. But it won’t be there for…
3D rendering of a quantum computer’s chandelier-like structure Shutterstock / Phonlamai Photo Eleven years ago, I was just getting a start on my PhD in theoretical physics, and to be honest with you I never thought about quantum computers, or writing about them, at all. Meanwhile, New Scientist staff were hard at work putting together…
