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An AI system trained on videos of operations successfully guided a robot to carry out gall bladder surgery on a dead pig, with minimal human assistance

Kat Zhou has won the Aquatic Life category in the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition, while a shot of a death-defying leap by a lemur took the top prize

Isometric exercises like wall squats are gentle on your body, but can enhance your fitness in a surprisingly efficient way, discovers Grace Wade 

Foundation's new series is full of new characters and dramatic potential. But instead of mining those rich seams, too many plotlines have become shallow and absurd. It's hard to see a good show go bad, says Bethan Ackerley

Language is evolving rapidly in a world of social media. Our millennial reviewer finds Adam Aleksic's Algospeak to be a much-needed helping hand

The awe-inspiring distances of the cosmos are hard to visualise, so how can we be certain we are measuring them correctly? Chanda Prescod-Weinstein explains

Feedback has been invited to an event next year in Shaoxing, China. It's an academic conference promising "revolutionary thinkers who are redefining human intimacy through cutting-edge robotics and AI"

The UK's health secretary has announced a 10-year plan to check newborns for a huge range of rare conditions. There are major medical and ethical issues with this, argues neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan

The population is set to plummet and we don't know how to stop it, warn Dean Spears and Michael Geruso in their new book, After the Spike

An example from the history of mathematics shows how views on the trustworthiness of artificial intelligence can quickly start to change

Previous estimates have suggested that more than half of people who stop taking antidepressants experience withdrawal symptoms, but now a review of the evidence suggests this isn't the case, at least for short-term use.

Humanity’s innate treachery is behind social ills ranging from inequality to abuse of power. Lessons from our ancestors can help defeat the enemy within

Exercise seems to help prevent cancer and reduce the growth of tumours, and that protective effect may be due to the way working out changes the gut microbiome

The oldest protein fragments ever recovered have been extracted from fossilised teeth found in Kenya's Rift Valley, revealing the remains belonged to the ancient ancestors of rhinoceroses and elephants

It’s easy to sneer at people who say they’ve fallen in love with ChatGPT. But we've been developing confusing feelings for bots for decades longer than you might think, writes Alex Wilkins. With so many people feeling lonely, can that be a good thing?

After a controversial project claiming to have resurrected the dire wolf, Colossal Biosciences has now announced plans to bring back nine species of the extinct moa bird

Maintaining good overall health is key to living a long life, but we may want to particularly focus on the state of our brain and immune system

We now have the ability to rapidly assess the death toll of climate change after extreme heat – a first-of-its-kind analysis has shown that it nearly tripled the death toll from the most recent European heatwave

A cancer-killing virus could soon be approved for use after shrinking tumours in a third of people with late-stage melanoma

Interest in the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin skyrocketed during the covid-19 pandemic, but evidence for many of its supposed health claims are lacking