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2021 was the year cryptocurrencies went completely off the rails

15 December 2021

Few of us have ever used cryptocurrencies, yet some of the schemes being dreamed up to tempt consumers are surreal and even alarming, writes Annalee Newitz

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter unlocked its rotor blades, allowing them to spin freely, on April 7, 2021, the 47th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. They had been held in place since before launch, and the unlocking is one of several milestones that must be met before the helicopter can attempt the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. This image was captured by the Mastcam-Z imager on NASA's Perseverance Mars rover on the following sol, April 8, 2021.

2021 in review: A helicopter flies on Mars for the first time

15 December 2021

In April, the Ingenuity helicopter became the first vehicle ever to attempt powered flight on another planet. Theodore Tzanetos tells New Scientist of the exhilaration he felt leading the team

A brain organoid with eye-like optic cups Elke Gabriel

2021 in review: When a brain blob in a dish grew a pair of ‘eyes’

15 December 2021

Incredible advances in growing living tissue in the lab took another amazing turn in August when a blob of brain cells grew eye-like structures

KR64CT (171219) -- BEIJING, Dec. 19, 2017 (Xinhua) -- Photo taken on Feb. 25, 2016 shows Pan Jianwei at a lab in the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province. For his role in pushing forward the development of quantum communications, Chinese physicist Pan Jianwei has been included in Nature's 10, the annual list of 10 people who mattered in science in 2017, which was released online Dec. 18, 2017 by the prestigious British journal

2021 in review: Jian-Wei Pan leads China’s quantum computing successes

15 December 2021

In July, the University of Science and Technology of China announced it had surpassed Google’s claimed quantum supremacy achievement. China’s ambitious quantum computing efforts are all under the oversight of one man, Jian-Wei Pan

2021 in review: AI firm DeepMind solves human protein structures

15 December 2021

In July, DeepMind announced that its AlphaFold model had worked out how most of the proteins in our bodies fold. Pushmeet Kohli tells New Scientist that there is more to come

Hiroshi Ezura, a professor of genetic engineering at the University of Tsukuba, with his genome edited tomato plant (Naoki Shoji).

2021 in review: CRISPR-edited food goes on sale to public

15 December 2021

In September, GABA-enriched tomatoes in Japan became the first foods modified by CRISPR gene editing to go on sale to the public

Mary Robinette Kowal: An exclusive short story for New Scientist

15 December 2021

A pianist faces a difficult choice when it comes to playing a new piece, in By the Pricking of My Robotic Thumbs, a short story by Hugo and Nebula-award winning author Mary Robinette Kowal

Watch a robot playing table tennis after just 90 minutes of training

10 December 2021

A robot arm controlled by an algorithm can play table tennis against human players after a short training session using both a virtual and real table tennis table

Terms and conditions, website cookies, concept on the screen of computer

AI reads boring terms and conditions documents so you don't have to

8 December 2021

The long, dense texts we all agree to when shopping online are incomprehensible to the average person, but now an artificial intelligence can highlight the important bits for you