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Neuroscience columnist Helen Thomson on how she discovered a host of evidence-based ways to keep her brain healthier in 2026

Feedback has spent some time sifting through 2025's key scientific achievements to come up with a range of weird and wonderful (and less wonderful) winners for our inaugural Backsies awards

Our gut microbiome has a huge influence on our overall health, but we haven't been clear on the specific bacteria with good versus bad effects. Now, a study of more than 34,000 people is shedding light on what a healthy gut microbiome actually consists of

From a particle smasher encircling the moon to an “impossible” laser, five scientists reveal the experiments they would run in a world powered purely by imagination

The rollout of a type of genetic technology called a gene drive for tackling malaria could be edging closer after a lab study supports its success

An excavation in Suffolk, UK, has uncovered pyrite and flint that appear to have been used by ancient humans to light fires some 400,000 years ago

From bonobos and rats to tickling robots, research is finally cracking the secrets of why we’re ticklish, and what that reveals about our brains

As Australian teenagers lose access to social media, observers say there are still many unknown questions about the ban, which came into force on 10 December

For centuries, Europeans thought that eternal daylight saturated the cosmos. The shift to a dark universe has had a profound psychological impact upon us

New evidence suggests that alcohol was a surprisingly big motivator in our monumental transition from hunting and gathering to farming – but was beer really more important to us than bread?

Skin fossils from a sauropod dinosaur examined with an electron microscope feature structures called melanosomes, which are similar to those that create the bright colours in birds' feathers

From an incredible series of revelations about the ancient humans called Denisovans to surprising discoveries about tool making, this year has given us a clearer picture of how and why humans evolved to be so different from other primates

Scientists were amazed to discover a 507-year-old clam that was already 100 in Shakespeare’s day, but why did it live so long and what can we learn from it?

Excavations of a workshop that was buried in Pompeii almost 2000 years ago have given archaeologists unique insights into Roman construction techniques and the longevity of the empire’s concrete

Our writers and contributors have chosen their favourite ever science-y books, films, TV shows, music, video games, board games and more to see you through the festive period

The time of day that cancer drugs are administered could make a big difference to a patient's outcomes, and would be a relatively simple intervention to roll out

How a Finnish physicist named Karl Lemström once became obsessed with recreating the aurora borealis from scratch – and may have ended up creating something even more intriguing

From machine learning to voting, the workings of the world demand randomisation, but true sources of randomness are surprisingly hard to find. Now quantum mechanics has supplied the answer

Mean temperatures this year approached 1.5°C above the preindustrial average, making it the second hottest year after 2024

Some of the elements used by living systems are far more abundant in Cassiopeia A than we thought, hinting that some parts of our galaxy might be more suitable for life than others