Is the fungal science in The Last of Us going off the rails? 09. May 2025 (14:00) With season 2 unfolding, the science of the fungal horror drama is becoming shakier. It is a pity that the creators haven’t thought about terrifying scenarios of real-life infection, says Corrado Nai(New Scientist)
Our favourite science fiction books of all time (the ones we forgot) 09. May 2025 (12:00) 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…(New Scientist)
Europe increasingly vulnerable to hailstones the size of golfballs 09. May 2025 (11:47) 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(New Scientist)
Record heat in 2023 and 2024 may just have been natural variability 08. May 2025 (16:36) 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(New Scientist)
The maths that tells us when a scientific discovery is real – or not 08. May 2025 (11:00) 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(New Scientist)
99.999 per cent of the deep seabed remains unexplored by humans 07. May 2025 (21:00) 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(New Scientist)
