New Scientist

New Scientist covers the latest developments in science and technology that will impact your world. New Scientist employs and commissions the best writers in their fields from all over the world. Our editorial team provide cutting-edge news, award-winning features and reports, written in concise and clear language that puts discoveries and advances in the context of everyday life today and in the future.

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An imperfect experiment • Different approaches to vaping regulation can show us how to make a smoke-free world

New Scientist

Encounter with a giant iceberg

Key agreements made at COP28 • The climate summit in Dubai opened with a deal on a long-awaited fund to help low-income countries pay for climate-related damage, reports James Dinneen

Climate records smashed repeatedly in 2023

CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels hit all-time high

Analysis Climate targets • How will we know when we pass 1.5°C of warming? It looks as if the world will pass this key landmark within a decade, but that might not become official until the 2040s, which could waste valuable time, says Michael Le Page

We can trigger positive tipping points to cut carbon emissions faster

Oil-producing states’ revenue may be cut by 60 per cent

Passing star could fling Earth past Pluto into the Oort cloud

Ultrasound could deliver vaccines without needles

IBM unveils a 1000-qubit computer • IBM has announced two new quantum computers, one of which is the second largest ever made

Shipwrecks help marine life survive trawling threat

Marmosets swap brain cells in utero • Most marmosets have non-identical twins or triplets, and it seems they exchange crucial cells

Traces of cannabis found in 17th-century bones

DNA repair captured in step-by-step detail

Obscure music may help people chat at parties

‘Perfect’ planetary system found 100 light years away

Rare gene variants can make you 5 centimetres taller

AI tuning can lead to rule breaking • OpenAI’s developer tool for its GPT-4 large language model can remove the safety measures

Bottlenose dolphins have the ability to sense electric fields

Robot eel reveals how the strange fish swims so efficiently

Supercontinents helped life evolve on land by trapping soil

How to pour water as quietly as possible

Tiny star harbours a colossal planet

Birdlike prints left millions of years before birds existed

Really brief

Vanishing past • It has been over 100 years since the US began protecting its ancient sites from development, but they remain vulnerable to politics, says Rachel Morgan

Field notes from space-time • Otherworldly fields I have been revisiting the Unruh effect, a beautiful, strange concept born from quantum field theory in curved space-time, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Illuminating

Your letters

Ice music to melt hearts • Research into the acoustics of Svalbard’s glaciers and caves is fundamental to composer Erland Cooper’s latest works, finds Arwa Haider

Scientific harmonies • Our resident experts Bethan Ackerley and Tim Boddy round up the best science-inflected music albums of 2023

Game on! • What would you do to combat climate change if you were a world superpower? That’s just one of the challenges set by 2023’s best board games, writes Jacob Aron

The truth about vaping • We finally have enough data to get a grip on the potential health consequences of this increasingly popular addiction, says Graham Lawton

How to vape (more) safely

Does vaping wreck your lungs?

HEADING FOR A FALL? • Reports that Western civilisation is about to collapse are premature, says complexity scientist Peter...