The veteran presenter adds authority to Secret Lives of Orangutans, a film about a family of endangered orangutans in Sumatra. File this new entry in his vast oeuvre under lovable but lightweight

The Origins and Habitability Lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a testbed exploring how geological conditions could impact life in environments such as early Earth, Mars or the icy moons of Jupiter

These photos showcase some of the intricately created birds' nests found in the Natural History Museum in Tring, UK, home to one of the world's largest ornithological collections

A camera trap at an Australian nature refuge has captured a boisterous interaction between a northern hairy-nosed wombat and an echidna

Some lizards dive into streams to escape predators, and a specialised bubble-breathing technique enables them to stay submerged for up to 18 minutes

From colonialism to AI, this Booker-longlisted novel urges us to wake up to how we treat wild creatures and places

Captive dolphins are more likely to make an open-mouthed expression when their playmate can see them and they often reciprocate, hinting that it is a form of visual communication

Musing on John Lewis-Stempel's latest book, England: A natural history, James McConnachie marks the flowering of other, more diverse voices in nature writing

Nearly 6000 species and subspecies of earthworms have been identified by scientists – but the true number could top 30,000

A new book from the science-writing legend is an Attenborough-esque romp through some of the wonders of the natural world. Just beware the title's misfiring metaphor

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

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

Eurasian reed warblers don’t just get a sense of direction from Earth’s magnetic field – they can also calculate their coordinates on a mental map

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

There are many scary claims about excess time on digital devices for children and teenagers. Here’s a guide to the real risks - and what to do about them

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

Clouds can trap heat or reflect it away from Earth, making their impact on global warming extraordinarily hard to predict. Now, new ways of studying them are lifting the fog

New research is revealing that common sense is a lot more idiosyncratic than we thought, with important implications for tackling political polarisation and the future of AI

Snoring is often viewed as harmless, at least to the snorer, but we are now uncovering its potentially serious effects on cardiovascular health. And finding ways to stop is surprisingly challenging

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

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

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

We can’t stir ordinary solids, but one research team now claims to have stirred an extraordinary quantum “supersolid”, generating tiny vortices

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

Time loops have long been the stuff of science fiction. Now, using the rules of quantum mechanics, we have a way to effectively transport a particle back in time – here’s how

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

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?

Photographer Enrico Sacchetti captures the power and potential of ITER, an international nuclear fusion experiment currently under construction in southern France

A mathematical proof shows that some quantum states can resist nature’s tendency to disorder – but only under very specific conditions

A new technique uses glowing molecules, laser light and microscopes to measure distances as minuscule as 0.1 nanometres – the width of a typical atom

A typically fragile quantum superposition has been made to last exceptionally long, and could eventually be used as a probe for discovering new physics

Inside a hunk of a material called a semimetal, scientists have uncovered signatures of bizarre particles that sometimes move like they have no mass, but at other times move just like a very massive particle

Allowing for moves that create quantum superpositions makes a quantum version of a Rubik’s cube incredibly complex, but not impossible to solve

Geologists think there may be vast natural stores of hidden hydrogen gas within Earth, but no one is sure how much there is or how much could be recovered for energy

A well in Nebraska is the first in the world to have been drilled in search of naturally occurring geologic hydrogen, but tests to determine how much of the gas it might supply are on hold because of a broken pump

Pressure on the San Andreas fault from a now-dried lake could have been sufficient to trigger past major earthquakes in California. The lake’s disappearance could explain why there have been no such quakes for nearly 300 years

From a photograph of algae choking an Indian river to a shocking depiction of the wearing away of the UK coast, these are some of the pictures in the running for the contest

Earth appears to have less mass beneath a certain part of the Indian Ocean compared with the rest of the planet. Plumes of magma at the location could explain why

Chris Packham's new BBC series, Earth, looks at significant moments in Earth's history, including anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss, "It's not a sixth mass extinction event that we're precipitating," he says, "it's a mass extermination event"

An analysis of GPS data has revealed a slow and otherwise undetectable slip of tectonic plates that begins two hours before an earthquake - but detecting this in advance would require more accurate sensors

Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, the largest lake in South America, has been captured in detail by the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission

Few volcanos come with more risk than Mexico's Popocatépetl, situated near Mexico City.  To mitigate danger, volcanologist Chiara Maria Petrone is trying to predict its next eruption

A drilling project in the Taklamakan desert is aiming to reach more than 11,000 metres below Earth’s surface as China explores the deep earth for resources

This spectacular selection of images is taken from the winners of the Northern Lights Photographer of the Year competition, run by Capture the Atlas

In Iceland, scientists are planning to drill two boreholes to a reservoir of liquid rock. One will give us our first direct measurements of magma – the other could supercharge geothermal power

Photographer Matjaz Krivic has been charting the effects of lithium mining on locals in the world's largest salt flat in Bolivia since 2016

The Kikai-Akahoya eruption of an underwater volcano off the coast of Japan ejected enough material to fill Lake Tahoe twice, three times as much as the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815

Mysterious green sunsets were reported after the massive eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 – now simulations show how they were created and just how rare they are

These stunning photographs are all shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards 2024

Humans are drastically changing the planet and the Anthropocene is a useful tool to help us deal with that – so let's stop quibbling over definitions