Neuroscientists have been surprised to discover that the human brain is teeming with microbes, and we are beginning to suspect they could play a role in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's

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

Discoveries from the genomes of the last Neanderthals are rewriting the story of how our own species came to replace them

Could the universe's missing matter be hiding in a "dark" extra dimension? We now have simple ways to test this outlandish idea - and the existence of extra dimensions more generally

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

What life is and how the mind works fall within the compass of one bold concept. But critics say that by attempting to explain everything, it may end up explaining nothing

The discovery that a small blue blob of neurons, the locus coeruleus, controls your mode of thinking suggests ways to increase learning, creativity, focus and alertness

As more of us take up vaping and concerns rise about the long-term effects, we now have enough data to get a grip on the health impact – and how it compares to smoking

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

The systems we use to produce food have many problems, from horrifying waste to their dependence on fossil fuels. Vaclav Smil explains how to fix them

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

An outlandish experiment searching for a brain network that tunes up and down the feeling of immersion is hoping to unlock the therapeutic effects of psychedelics

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

Most ingredients touted as the key to better health fail to live up to the hype but fibre bucks this trend, with benefits for the whole body, not just the gut

Peaks in appetite and metabolism driven by our body's inbuilt clocks mean that eating at the wrong time can have consequences for our health and waistline

From seed oils to olive oil, we now have an overwhelming choice of what to cook with. Here’s how they all stack up, according to the scientific evidence

Our ancestors probably used a wide range of plant-based tools that have since been lost to history. Now we're finally getting a glimpse of this Botanic Age

From nuclear strikes to giant spikes, discover the systems in place to prevent a collision and test your decision-making to see if you could avoid a catastrophic impact

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

Extreme weather and a growing population is driving a food security crisis. What can we do to break the vicious cycle of carbon emissions, climate change and soaring food costs – or is it already too late?

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

A new equation shows a surprisingly simple relationship between pressure and the temperature needed to melt any solid substance into a liquid

Claudia de Rham thinks that gravitons, hypothetical particles thought to carry gravity, have mass. If she’s right, we can expect to see “rainbows” in ripples in space-time

Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist Peter Higgs has died aged 94. He proposed the particle that gives other particles mass – now named the Higgs boson and discovered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012

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

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

The Large Hadron Collider is testing entanglement in a whole new energy range, probing the meaning of quantum theory – and the possibility that an even stranger reality lies beneath

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

Concern over the risks of enabling nuclear weapons development is usually focused on nuclear fission reactors, but the potential harm from more advanced fusion reactors has been underappreciated

The quantum principle of superposition – the idea of particles being in multiple places at once – could help make quantum batteries that charge within minutes

Ultra-fast pulses of laser light can be shaped into vortices similar to smoke rings – when chained together, they can carry enough information to transmit a simple image

A practical superconductor would transform the efficiency of electronics. After decades of hunting, several key breakthroughs are inching us very close to this coveted prize

A contentious meeting of physicists highlighted concerns, failures and possible fixes for a crisis in condensed matter physics

The Linac Coherent Light Source in California fired an X-ray pulse that lasted only a few hundred billionths of a billionth of a second but carried nearly a terawatt of power

Subatomic particles can appear to instantly influence one another, no matter how far apart they are. These days, that isn't a source of mystery – it's a fact of the universe and a resource for new technologies

Experiments show that effect doesn’t always follow cause in the weird world of subatomic particles, offering fresh clues about the quantum origins of space-time

Fractals are common in nature because of the surprisingly simple way they are made. Mathematically, they also help us make sense of complexity and chaos – and maybe even quantum weirdness

From the vastness of the universe to the infinitesimal particles that comprise it, extremes of scale defy comprehension – and present a problem for physicists seeking a unified theory of everything

One way to explain why time only moves forward is the quantum arrow of time, and it has major implications for both the universe's early period and its eventual demise

When I heard Stephen Hawking extol the mysteries of black holes, I knew theoretical physics was what I wanted to do. There is still so much to learn about these strange regions, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Physicists have coaxed a cloud of atoms into having a temperature beyond absolute zero and placed them in a geometric structure that could produce an unknown form of matter

Fictional portrayals of parallel universes are fun to explore, but the scientific view of the multiverse looks very different

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

A technique to charge a battery inside a quantum computer relies on sorting qubits in an imitation of Maxwell’s demon, a 19th-century thought experiment once thought to break the laws of physics

While time is relative, it still flows in one direction for every observer. We don’t yet understand why, but some physicists are looking for answers that invoke the evolution of entropy, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

ITER, a €20 billion nuclear fusion reactor under construction in France, will now not switch on until 2035 - a delay of 10 years. With smaller commercial fusion efforts on the rise, is it worth continuing with this gargantuan project?