New Scientist

3 days ago | newscientist.com | Alexandra Thompson

Per Borghammer’s “aha” moment came nearly 20 years ago. The neuroscientist was reading a paper from researchers who were examining whether REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD), a condition that causes people to act out their dreams and is often found in people who later develop Parkinson’s disease, could be an early form of the neurological condition. Rather than starting with the brain, however, the team instead looked for nerve cell loss in the heart.

6 days ago | newscientist.com | Carissa Wong

Five people have witnessed an intense green-blue colour that has never been seen by humans before, thanks to a device that might one day enable those with a type of colour blindness to experience typical vision. We perceive colour via the retina at the back of the eye, which typically contains three types of light-detecting cone cells – called S, M and L – that absorb a range of blue, green or red light, respectively, and then send signals to the brain.

6 days ago | newscientist.com | Jeremy Hsu

A quantum magnetic navigation system has been tested to guide an aircraft – and it outperformed standard backup systems that planes rely on when GPS signals are jammed. GPS and other global navigation satellite systems use radio signals transmitted between space and Earth. But these radio waves are relatively weak and are vulnerable to intentional jamming, as we saw in 2024 when GPS jamming and spoofing affected transatlantic flights.

1 week ago | newscientist.com | Alex Wilkins

One of the strongest signs of life outside Earth was announced by astronomers this week, but other astronomers were quick to caution how difficult verifying such a detection can be. That raises the question: will there ever come a point where we can definitively say we have evidence of extraterrestrial life, and when might that be? The supposed signs of life were picked up by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), from the exoplanet K2-18b, 124 light years away.

1 week ago | newscientist.com | Alex Wilkins

The Antikythera mechanism, a mysterious ancient Greek device that is often called the world’s first computer, may not have functioned at all, according to a simulation of its workings. But researchers say we can’t be sure of this since the machine is so badly damaged. Since the mechanism was discovered in 1901, in a shipwreck thought to date to around 60 BC, researchers have struggled to work out exactly why it was built.