This week's magazine

Table of contents

Leaders

Health

We must hold a steady course on our response to covid-19

EARLY on in the pandemic, we heard a lot about behavioural fatigue – the hunch that people would quickly grow tired of restrictions on their lives and throw caution to the wind. It was a factor in the reluctance of the UK government to go into lockdown too quickly, a delay that led to the …

News

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News

Health

Exclusive: Concerns raised about vital UK covid-19 infection survey

The Office for National Statistics' survey is designed to test a representative sample of the UK population The UK’s largest scheme for tracking the spread of the coronavirus is at risk of providing a misleading picture of the epidemic, as a growing share of people invited to take part fail to respond or complete a …

News

Physics

First room-temperature superconductor could spark energy revolution

News

Life

Some animals may use their penis bone to scoop out a rival's sperm

News

Life

Leafcutter ants choose architecturally sound building materials

News

Life

Tardigrades survive deadly radiation by glowing in the dark

News

Environment

Ivory Coast’s elephant populations are now in catastrophic decline

News

Technology

Water could be extracted from desert air using heat from sunlight

News

Space

The moon had a magnetic field that helped protect Earth's atmosphere

News

Humans

Climate change may have driven early human species to extinction

News

Environment

Artificial rope bridges help stop rare primates jumping to extinction

News

Health

Historical records hint daughters of older mothers may be less fertile

News

Life

Python tried to eat sleeping woman while being tracked by biologists

News

Health

India's coronavirus pandemic is leading to many more deaths from TB

News

Health

UK trial plans to infect volunteers with the coronavirus in January

News

Health

Is the coronavirus evolving and will it become more or less deadly?

News

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Analysis

Health

It is bad science to say covid-19 infections will create herd immunity

Letting covid-19 circulate freely through crowds could lead to millions of deaths A S I write this, my 19-year-old son is self-isolating in his university room with symptoms of covid-19 , awaiting test results. He is quite poorly, though overwhelmingly likely to make a full recovery. But I worry that he will be one of …

News

Health

Should we plan for regular 'circuit-breaker' coronavirus lockdowns?

News

Technology

Email should be obsolete by now, so why are we still using it?

News

Health

US election 2020: Trump's impact on the environment, health and space

News

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Aperture

Technology

CERN muon detector gets major upgrade for better particle hunting

Weighing in at 14,000 tonnes, the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider can now detect more of the subatomic particles created when protons are collided

Regulars

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Features

Health

Your covid-19 risk: How to navigate this new world of uncertainty

Baffling statistics and their impact on our emotions can make it hard to evaluate risk in this pandemic. But there are simple steps you can take to put risk in context and feel more confident in your decisions

Features

Health

Viruses have busy social lives that we could manipulate to defeat them

Features

Physics

Ball lightning is so strange it might just come from another dimension

Features

Health

You can manage your covid-19 risk by setting your own ‘contact budget’

Features

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Culture

Humans

How big data helped elect President Kennedy during the cold war

Big data's power is revealed by two books covering a cold-war version of Cambridge Analytica that helped John F. Kennedy get elected-and how modern social media can rig votes today

Culture

Technology

Feels Good Man review: Reclaiming Pepe the Frog from the alt-right

Culture

Don’t Miss: The War on Wildlife podcast exposes our attacks on animals

Culture

Humans

Black Box review: Smart sci fi plays with identity, fate and death

Culture

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More

Environment

How many birds do cats kill? Help this science project find out

Researchers want your help to try to find out how big a problem domestic cats are for wildlife in the UK. All you have to do is join the What The Cat Dragged In project, says Layal Liverpool

Regulars

Puzzle #82: Dogmandoo

Regulars

Twisteddoodles on quizzing a researcher about how mice run

Regulars

Tom Gauld's favourite areas of mathematics that double as album titles

Regulars

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Regulars

Why the end of the world will come preprogrammed in a spreadsheet

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word