In this week’s issue: A surprising twist on cause and effect reveals how everything comes from nothing. Grab a copy in shops now or download our app for digital editions.⁠ https://t.co/62IUy40AyB

Chytrid fungus is a scourge to global amphibian populations, but before it kills some frogs, it can produce symptoms that may help the infected animals find mates and spread the fungus further

Unexplained gamma ray radiation coming from the edge of the Milky Way galaxy could be produced by self-annihilating dark matter particles – but the idea requires further investigation

Do you need to fairly allocate players to teams, or sort out a pot of badly brewed coffee? Katie Steckles has a mathematical solution

Dental problems often arise or get worse during pregnancy, and a new study hints that rapid changes to the oral microbiome at this time could be at least partly to blame

Orforglipron, a GLP-1 drug taken as a pill, achieved positive results in people with obesity and type 2 diabetes, although it seems less effective than injectable drugs

The world, the universe and us is LIVE 🚨 @rowhoop, @PennySarchet and the team on: 💧 Evolution of sperm and mystery of the scrotum 🧠 How our brain rewires itself 4 times in life 🌳 @nebriefing scenarios of climate breakdown https://t.co/kzzN2JTXez

Body fat, often reviled, is actually a vital organ that contributes to your health and well-being. It is time for us to stop vilifying fat and to start exploring how we can harness its power

The distant universe might be littered with supermassive stars between 1000 and 10,000 times the mass of the sun, which could solve a cosmic mystery about the origins of extremely large black holes

Our brain wiring seems to undergo four major turning points at ages 9, 32, 66 and 83, which could influence our capacity to learn and our risk of certain conditions

Google is reportedly in talks to sell its tensor processing units – a type of computer chip specially designed for AI – to other tech companies, a move that could unsettle the dominant chip-maker Nvidia

Quantum theory fails to explain how the reality we experience emerges from the world of particles. A new take on quantum cause and effect could bridge the gap

New Scientist Book Club members share their thoughts on our November read, Grace Chan's Every Version of You

It might sound like dystopian science fiction, but discovering how to reshape memories responsibly is helping us to heal the brain from within, says Steve Ramirez

An experiment 180 years ago first demonstrated a connection between light and electromagnetism – but the link is deeper than we thought

Early humans like Neanderthals probably kissed and our ape ancestors could have done it as far back as 21 million years ago.

Logging and mining are destroying swathes of the Congo rainforest, with the result that African forests went from being a carbon sink to a carbon source in 2010 to 2017

The New Scientist Book Club is currently reading Iain M. Banks's classic sci-fi novel The Player of Games. In this extract, we meet protagonist Gurgeh for the first time

See some of the winning entries for this year's Oceania Photo Contest, including Miesa Grobbelaar's shot of a whale, which took the top prize

Inspired by natural polymers like DNA, chemists have devised a way to engineer plastic so it breaks down when it is no longer needed, rather than polluting the environment

It's like the International Space Station... but underwater. In this New Scientist Colab podcast we're inside Vanguard to explore the hatches, the tech, and the psychology of living in a sub-sea capsule. https://t.co/2chUqkvJ9m Sponsored by @DeepEngineered