Rival tribes of bacteria armed with poison darts are fighting it out in your gut, with armies of traitors often winning the day

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

For nervous newbie gardeners, starting out with a single plant in a small pot is pitched as an easy win by the horticultural industry. James Wong explains why it isn't

Single-celled organisms called archaea can become multicellular when compressed, highlighting the role of physical forces in evolution

A fossil of a tadpole from Argentina is 161 million years old - and isn't that different from some modern species

Orca – Black & White Gold digs deep into the dirty waters surrounding the killer whale trade and captures a daring rescue mission

DNA analysis suggests Pando, a quaking aspen in Utah with thousands of stems connected by their roots, is between 16,000 and 81,000 years old

Shortlisted for the Close-up Photographer of the Year contest, these images zoom in on animals in all their glory

Asian elephants at Berlin Zoo show impressive skill when using a hose as a tool, and even appear to sabotage each other by stopping the flow of water

Never underestimate what a single gopher can achieve in a day: one of the burrowing mammals helped boost soil fungi in an area blanketed by ash from the explosive eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington state

Campaigners are calling for stricter controls on rodenticides after finding that birds of prey in England are increasingly being exposed to high doses of rat poison

There are real benefits to a positive mindset, but the idea that we should always look on the bright side has gone too far. Research into toxic positivity can help restore balance

Strange solids called temporal metamaterials finally make it possible to investigate the controversial idea of quantum friction – and push special relativity to its limits

Are points of infinite curvature, where general relativity breaks down, always hidden inside black holes? An audacious attempt to find out is shedding light on the mystery of quantum gravity

The same genetic tools being used to resurrect the woolly mammoth and dodo could help many other vulnerable species that have yet to die out

Some people find the scale of the universe existentially frightening, but here's why you should take it as a source of comfort

People don't realise just how bad our antibiotic resistance problem is, says Jeanne Marrazzo, the top infectious disease specialist in the US

Whether space and time are part of the universe or they emerge from quantum entanglement is one of the biggest questions in physics. And we are getting close to the truth

Remote sensing, including lidar, reveals that the Amazon was once home to millions of people. The emerging picture of how they lived challenges ideas of human cultural evolution

It may soon be possible to vaccinate ourselves against the diseases of old age, keeping our body and brain healthier for longer

Your body is home to trillions of beneficial viruses crucial for a healthy microbiome. We may one day be able to tweak this "virome" to treat obesity and anxiety

Recent fossil finds suggest that big brains weren't an evolutionary asset to our ancestors but evolved by accident – and are likely to shrink again in the near future

Alex Lupsasca plans to extend Earth's largest telescope network beyond the atmosphere with a space-based dish. It could spot part of a black hole we've never seen before – and perhaps discover new physics

There may be ways to work with your body’s natural daily and monthly cycles to get the maximum benefits from workouts and avoid injury

Devices that let people with paralysis walk and talk are rapidly improving. Some see a future in which we alter memories and download skills – but major challenges remain

There are secrets aplenty in a pot of honey – from information about bees' "micro-bee-ota" to DNA from the environment – that can help us fight food fraud and even monitor shifts in climate

Conventional measures like blood pressure and body mass index only tell you so much. Testing your microbiome and metabolites, or even discovering your “immune grade”, can offer a clearer picture of your health

Up to 100,000 extraordinary species, from spiders and beetles to salamanders and fish, live in subterranean caves and cracks. They aren’t as safe down there as we thought

With its particles in two places at once, quantum theory strains our common sense notions of how the universe should work. But one group of physicists says we can get reality back if we just redefine its foundations

From migrating sauropods and semi-aquatic predators to doting parents, palaeontologists are finally uncovering the mysteries of the lifestyles of dinosaurs

Male pattern baldness could soon be a thing of the past, with new hair loss treatments beginning to show tantalising results

We're finally pinning down the mechanisms that drive obsessive-compulsive disorder, revealing a complex combination of imbalanced brain networks, the immune system and even gut microbes

How did the supermassive black holes we’re now seeing in the early universe get so big so fast? Astrophysicist Sophie Koudmani is using sophisticated galaxy simulations to figure it out

Confidence in politics is falling around the world. Can scientific insights help us create a fairer, smarter foundation for government?

Daniele Oriti’s pursuit of a theory of quantum gravity has led him to the startling conclusion that the laws of nature don’t exist independently of us – a perspective shift that could yield fresh breakthroughs

Cases of prostate cancer are surging alarmingly around the world. Thankfully, we are developing more accurate tests that can catch the condition early

Friends who blow hot and cold put more strain on your physical and mental health than enemies. Here's how to spot them and handle them

Physicists finally know whether black holes destroy the information contained in infalling matter. The problem is that the answer hasn’t lit the way to a new understanding of space-time

New research into the moments between wakefulness and sleep could bring hope for insomniacs and even make us more creative problem-solvers

Recent research shows that anti-inflammatory diets are not as faddish as they might sound, with the power to reduce the risk of heart attacks and some cancers

Diets that claim to control excess oestrogen or stress hormones are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. They could be good for us, just not for the reasons claimed

The controversies surrounding football’s video assistant referee (VAR) system highlight our troubled relationship with uncertainty – and point to potential solutions

You might have heard about plans to establish a self‑sustaining city on Mars. Here’s what life would really be like on the Red Planet

A super-stretchy hydrogel can stretch to 15 times its original length and return to its initial shape, and could be used to make soft inflatable robots

The physicist Peter Higgs quietly revolutionised quantum field theory, then lived long enough to see the discovery of the Higgs boson he theorised. Despite receiving a Nobel prize, he remained in some ways as elusive as the particle that shares his name

In the 1920s, Erwin Schrödinger wrote an equation that predicts how particles-turned-waves should behave. Now, researchers are perfectly recreating those predictions in the lab

The very weak forces of attraction caused by the Casimir effect can now be used to manipulate microscopic gold flakes and turn them into a light-trapping tool

Two important barriers to a stable, powerful fusion reaction have been leapt by an experiment in a small tokamak reactor, but we don’t yet know if the technique will work in larger devices

Cosmological puzzles are tempting astronomers to rethink our simple picture of the universe – and ask whether dark matter is even stranger than we thought

Information contained within quantum objects gets scrambled when they interact. Physicists have now derived a speed limit for this process, challenging the idea that black holes are the fastest data scramblers