New Scientist Australian Edition

New Scientist covers the latest developments in science and technology that will impact your world. New Scientist employs and commissions the best writers in their fields from all over the world. Our editorial team provide cutting-edge news, award-winning features and reports, written in concise and clear language that puts discoveries and advances in the context of everyday life today and in the future.

A note from the anniversary editor

Policy brain • Neuroscience isn’t ready to dictate the way we govern

New Scientist Australian Edition

Why autism and ADHD are on the rise

Autism may have distinct subtypes • The discovery that autism can vary according to the strength of people’s brain connections adds to growing evidence of subtypes within the condition, finds Michael Marshall

Remarkable fossils rewrite how animals conquered the land

El Niño’s impacts on the UK are hard to predict but we should be prepared

Mysterious substance found on Titan and Pluto

AI “inbreeding” is rife in training • People paid to train AI admit to using chatbots instead, which could reduce the power and usefulness of future models, reports Matthew Sparkes

Complex life may survive the sun’s expansion – for a while

Cervical cancer deaths plummet due to HPV vaccine

Uranus has an icy core • The detection of a gas normally associated with ice suggests it did form like Neptune after all

Pigeons keep their eyes on the prize when flying

Inside the start-up aiming for a giant leap in robot intelligence • Drawing on the success of large language models could help robots learn to carry out any task independently. Alex Wilkins pays a visit

Drugs to chill the body may limit brain damage from stroke

Japan shifted position after 2011’s huge earthquake

Seaweed for CO₂ removal may backfire

Microbiome influences brain plasticity

Solstice marked before Stonehenge • A timber monument built centuries before Stonehenge was neatly aligned with the past summer solstice sunrise, discovers Michael Marshall

Magnetic sperm could allow IVF inside the body

Ice melt is starving parts of Arctic Ocean of vital nutrient

Plague hit pre-farming community • It had long been assumed that large disease outbreaks didn’t start until the rise of agriculture, but a burial site in Siberia challenges that, discovers Michael Le Page

New species of unusual walking shark identified

Eat your gut healthy • The disruption of your gut microbiome is a major consequence, and possible cause, of ageing. Graham Lawton looks into how to care for your friendly bacteria as you get older

Chicken-or-egg cosmology • Galaxies and their supermassive black holes evolve together, but which came first is an ongoing question. Now, we may finally have an answer, says Leah Crane

Near miss • A Waymo nearly hit me as I was cycling through London, but I’m still optimistic about driverless cars, says Matthew Sparkes

Your letters

Liquid gold

Pick of the crop • The first six months of 2026 have brought us popular science reads on everything from consciousness to cosmology. Liz Else rounds up the best books of the year so far

Strange tides • M. John Harrison’s wholly original tale of alien invasion tops columnist Emily H. Wilson’s favourite reads of the year to date

Unpopular popular science • Not everyone in the New Scientist Book Club was impressed with The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins 50 years on, says Alison Flood

What we are reading in July

Your changeable brain

When do you become an adult?

Our first thoughts

The parental brain

Our brain’s extraordinary ability to rebuild after stroke

Midlife glow up

The...