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Ancient humans took two routes to Australia 60,000 years ago
Scientists have long tried to uncover the perilous journey humans took to reach the ancient land mass that now makes up Australia. Now, a genetic study has edged us closer to understanding how and when they achieved this
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Why Google’s custom AI chips are shaking up the tech industry
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
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Upheavals to the oral microbiome in pregnancy may be behind tooth loss
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
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Africa’s forests are now emitting more CO2 than they absorb
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
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Plastic can be programmed to have a lifespan of days, months or years
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
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Our verdict on sci-fi novel Every Version of You: We (mostly) loved it
New Scientist Book Club members share their thoughts on our November read, Grace Chan's Every Version of You
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Read an extract from The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
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
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Why sci-fi novelist Iain M. Banks was an ‘astounding’ world-builder
The New Scientist Book Club is currently reading the late Iain M. Banks’s Culture novel The Player of Games. Fellow science fiction author Bethany Jacobs reveals how his work inspired her
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Supermassive dark matter stars may be lurking in the early universe
Stars powered by dark matter instead of nuclear fusion could solve several mysteries of the early universe, and we may have spotted the first hints that they are real
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Origin story of domestic cats rewritten by genetic analysis
Domestic cats originated in North Africa and spread to Europe in the past 2000 years, according to DNA evidence, while in China a different species of cat lived alongside people much earlier