In Common Side Effects, Marshall makes a key discovery Warner Bros. Discovery Cataclysms, conspiracies and rebellions featured in many of 2025’s biggest sci-fi shows. And while all that instability reflects poorly on the state of our world, at least it did make for fantastic television. Here are six series that should be on your to-watch…
Josie Ford Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more Locked out The phrase “you couldn’t make it up”, Feedback feels, is often misunderstood. It doesn’t mean there are limits to the imagination, but rather that there are some developments you can’t include in a fictional story because…
A shot from Human, about our ancient ancestors BBC/BBC Studios Human (BBC iPlayer/NOVA) Ella al-Shamahi is the perfect guide to our ancient ancestors. In Human, she takes us on a whistle-stop tour of our past over a span of 300,000 years, including our turbulent relations with other hominins. The palaeoanthropologist builds a complex story in…
Swimmers in January at Beckenham Place Park lake in London AMcCulloch / Alamy It’s 8am and I’m standing at the edge of my local lake at Beckenham Place Park in London, the early morning sun just beginning to peek over the trees. A layer of mist is rising from the cold water and all is…
Cereal farming produced excess food that could be stored and taxed LUIS MONTANYA/MARTA MONTANYA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The cultivation of cereal grains probably led to the emergence of the first states – which operated mafia-like protection rackets − and to the adoption of writing for the purposes of recording taxes. There is wide debate over how…
The wiring of our neurons changes with the passing decades Alexa Mousley, University of Cambridge Our brain function is far from static throughout our lives. We already know that our capacity to learn, and our risk of cognitive decline, varies from when we are a newborn through to our 90s. Now, scientists may have uncovered…
Adrià Voltà The ball rolls across the floor because it was kicked, just as Earth orbits the sun because it is tugged by gravity. The connection between cause and effect is fundamental to how we understand the world – or at least, it is for the world we see, governed by classical physics. Notoriously, everything…
Seafloor covered with manganese nodules Science History Images/Alamy A process to extract metals from their ore with hydrogen could make deep-sea mining for valuable materials more sustainable than mining on land, a new study claims. Swathes of the ocean floor are littered with nodules the size of tennis balls. These polymetallic nodules are comprised largely…
The swimming machinery of sperm has ancient origins Christoph Burgstedt/Alamy The evolutionary origin of sperm can be traced back to a single-celled ancestor of all living animals. Almost all animals reproduce by having a single-celled stage of their life cycle, involving two types of sex cells, or gametes. Eggs are larger cells containing genetic material…
Climate campaigners march on the sidelines of the COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil PABLO PORCIUNCULA/AFP via Getty Images Ten years on from the Paris Agreement, we should be seeing a massive ratcheting up of climate action. Instead, the past four years have seen almost no progress – including at the latest COP summit, which failed…