New Scientist - Home

1. Our favourite science fiction books of all time (the ones we forgot)
   Following on from our first list, we asked New Scientist staff to pick even more of their favourite sci-fi books of all time. From Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin to Star Wars – the list has it all this time, we hope…
2. Europe increasingly vulnerable to hailstones the size of golfballs
   Very large hail – hailstones more than 5 centimetres in diameter – poses a growing threat to Europe as the climate warms, with increasing risk of expensive damage to cars and property
3. Failed Soviet probe will soon crash to Earth – and we don't know where
   Kosmos 482, a Soviet spacecraft that never made it beyond Earth’s orbit on its way to Venus, is due to come crashing down on 9 or 10 May
4. Record heat in 2023 and 2024 may just have been natural variability
   Simulations suggest that an extraordinary jump in temperatures seen in 2023 and 2024 could simply be natural variability, rather than a new phase of climate change as some researchers have suggested
5. Major US cities like New York and Seattle are sinking at a rapid rate
   Groundwater extraction, plate tectonics and consequences of the last glacial period mean that most of the US's biggest cities are sinking
6. The maths that tells us when a scientific discovery is real – or not
   When huge scientific discoveries are made, you may hear that they are “statistically significant” or pass a threshold called “5 sigma” – but those calculations can be manipulated to make claims seem grander than they are, finds Jacob Aron
7. Dementia cases are rising faster in China than the rest of the world
   Cases of dementia doubled worldwide between 1990 and 2021, but more than quadrupled in China during the same period
8. 99.999 per cent of the deep seabed remains unexplored by humans
   Deep-sea submersibles have been diving for decades, but records show that we have still only explored a tiny area of the deep seabed, which makes up the majority of Earth's topography
9. Would snails be better than whales for explaining big data? Maybe
   Feedback's proposal that the genome of the blue whale could be used to communicate the scale of large datasets is knocked back by a reader with a radical alternative suggestion
10. These photos reveal the unique agricultural system of the Maya people
    Combining sustainability, climate resilience and environmental preservation, the ancient “milpa” system of the Maya revealed in these images has been practiced for millennia