Telling Lies is a game where you sift through video calls to solve a mystery. Half the time you don't know what you should be doing, but that's part of the fun, says Jacob Aron

Once the coronavirus pandemic is over, we must work out how to stop the spread of poor information that has helped make a bad situation that much worse

Many countries are focusing coronavirus testing on people who have covid-19 symptoms. But regularly testing all essential workers would have more of an impact

Amid the global coronavirus outbreak, a second epidemic of preliminary, unverified and misinterpreted research has broken out. Can it be fixed?

A study of brain cells in a dish adds to growing evidence that Alzheimer’s disease can be caused by herpes viruses, but antiviral treatment may help stop it

The BCG tuberculosis vaccine boosts the production of immune cells and this may explain how it protects newborns from dying of sepsis

The leading hypothesis for how the moon formed involves a collision between a Mars-sized object and Earth that would have boiled away elements like carbon, making its discovery on the moon a mystery

Finland’s two-year test of universal basic income has concluded that it doesn't seem to disincentivise working, and improves recipients’ mental and financial well-being

Many ancient monuments are claimed to be aligned to celestial phenomena, but we now have the first statistical evidence this is the case for the Egyptian pyramids

Mouse neurons trapped inside cages grow long appendages to connect to each other. Trapping the cells allows us to precisely control their growth

The latest coronavirus news updated every day including coronavirus cases, the latest news, features and interviews from New Scientist and essential information about the covid-19 pandemic

New Zealand is on track to eliminate covid-19 altogether, but keeping the virus out for good will be a challenge, and the economic impacts are likely to hurt

About 80 per cent of stars in the Milky Way’s central bulge have relatively close encounters with another star, which can fling off any planets orbiting them

Finally, I’ve waded through the entire backlog of grading for my genetics class, and have sent every student a personal email stating where they currently stand, what assignments are missing (I’m offering amnesty on all the homework), and what they can do to improve their grade this week — lab reports, for instance, can be […]

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and no one ever told me about the Pacific folding trap-door spider. I sure never saw one. But this lucky woman out walking her dog saw one on the sidewalk and — oh what a waste — ran away. Experts say the spider she spotted is a Pacific […]

Fortunately, I haven’t been made to drink hemlock yet, but I did get this nice message. Over a decade ago, I found your blog. I was an English major at the time, but I found the debate over science more intriguing and changed my major to biology. The course work was so fun, I sailed […]

I was scheduled to get a routine physical a while back, cancelled for obvious reasons, and last week Stevens County Medical Center called me to come in for it today, which feels odd. I guess our local clinic has not been overwhelmed — there have been zero reported cases of COVID-19 in Stevens County, perhaps […]

Milo Yawannapissoff and Michelle Malkin have been collaborating, and the results are even more awful than you can probably imagine. They decided to work together to create an “America First” reading list for their followers. Just from their choice of subject you can tell it’s going to be a collection of racists’ greatest hits. Milo […]

We sometimes speak of the American university, as if it is all one thing, where you’ll attend and be pampered for four years and pop out at graduation to a job and a well-paid career. Corey Robin exposes the inequities of the university system by comparing City University of New York, a massive public university, […]

“Venezuela!” is the reflexive argument of the right-wingers against socialism, so it’s not surprising that a cocky gang of American thugs would decide they could just swagger in and topple the Venezuelan government — 62 stupid mercenaries against a nation of 28 million people. They were so arrogant that the head of the mercenary organization […]

Tell me if this strategy sounds familiar. Pick a target, any target, as long as the Trumpkins hate ’em. Pay a non-credible source to make up an unlikely story of sexual malfeasance. Hold a press conference in which the story palpably unravels. Profit! That was the game plan in their phony accusations against Mueller and […]

This story is a bit on the nose. Hello, Peter Ludlow here, CEO of InGen, the company behind the wildly successful dinosaur-themed amusement park, Jurassic Park. As you’re all aware, after an unprecedented storm hit the park, we lost power and the velociraptors escaped their enclosure and killed hundreds of park visitors, prompting a two-month […]