New Scientist

A naturalist finds a hallucinogenic mushroom with the power to cure all ailments in the animated series Common Side Effects. Big Pharma is hot on his trail in this beautifully made show, says Bethan Ackerley

A weatherproof box and motion-trigger camera help photographer Will Burrard-Lucas capture images of rarely seen African elephants

The size and shape of a giraffe’s spots seem to influence how well the animals survive when temperatures get hotter or colder than normal

A species of houndshark called Mustelus lenticulatus makes sharp clicking noises when handled. Until now, sharks as a group were thought to be universally quiet

Chemical analysis suggests the 400-million-year-old fossil Prototaxites was neither plant, animal or fungus – hinting at a mysterious life form that went extinct long ago

Young female black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys often want to hold other females’ infants, but mothers are much more permissive of experienced caregivers

A dinosaur fossil discovered in Mongolia boasts the largest ever complete claw, but the herbivorous species only used it to grasp vegetation

Traditional advice tells us to only move growing plants to a pot one size larger. The science shows that you don't need to bother with this slow transition, says James Wong

Recordings of brain activity in budgerigars reveal sets of brain cells that represent different sounds like keys on a keyboard – a structure never seen before in any bird brain

Birds do it, chimps do it, even monarch butterflies do it – and by paying more attention to how animals self-medicate, we can find new treatments for ourselves

We may be starting to get a grasp on what kick-started life on Earth – and it could help us search for it on other planets

A newly discovered mechanism could explain the shock finding last year that oxygen is produced by metallic nodules on the seafloor – and it might be happening on other planets, too

A study of the fossilised fur of six mammals from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods has found they were all greyish-brown in colour, which would have helped them hide from dinosaurs

Palaeontologists have discovered 66 three-toed dinosaur footprints in a slab of rock that has been on display for 20 years at a school in Queensland

A highly pathogenic strain of bird flu is spreading south along the Antarctic Peninsula and could devastate populations of penguins and other seabirds

Some male octopuses tend to get eaten by their sexual partners, but male blue-lined octopuses avoid this fate with help from one of nature’s most potent venoms

How sexual reproduction came about has long been a mystery, but an evolutionary model suggests it could have started with cells fusing to increase their food reserves

Coots' nests in Amsterdam are built using discarded plastic, providing a time capsule into the material's use over the past few decades

When competition for food is high, both chimps and bonobos sometimes rub their genitals together to cope

We are starting to understand how Greenland sharks can live for centuries without commonly developing tumours