The latest coronavirus news updated every day including coronavirus cases, the latest news, features and interviews from New Scientist and essential information about the covid-19 pandemic

Cuba is the smallest country to get a covid-19 candidate vaccine into phase III trials and has begun testing it in 1.7 million people prior to approval

The increasing severity and frequency of droughts in the tropics due to climate change may be accelerating the destruction of Palaeolithic rock paintings in Indonesia

A set of 58-million-year-old footprints suggest hippo-like mammals were living by the sea millions of years before one group of mammals became whales

Elon Musk has performed a sudden U-turn on bitcoin over concerns about its energy usage, and says his electric car firm Tesla will no longer accept the cryptocurrency as payment

Some 2500 years ago the Greeks fought many battles – and isotopic analysis of skeletons from one conflict suggests victory may have been made possible with the help of non-Greek mercenaries

Claims of finding life on Mars, plus letting gravity do its thing and why pigeons are moving to Whitby, in Feedback’s weird weekly round-up

Neuroplasticity, or the brain's ability to remodel itself, enables us to interpret all kinds of sensations. We can use that to create new ways to perceive the world, says neuroscientist David Eagleman

Superdeterminism makes sense of the quantum world by suggesting it is not as random as it seems, but critics say it undermines the whole premise of science. Does the idea deserve its terrible reputation?

A new era of soft, shape-shifting and nano‑sized machines that crawl through your blood and attach to your shoes is coming, writes Annalee Newitz

Three studies suggest that covid-19 can age different parts of the immune system, possibly triggering symptoms of long covid – but the effects may be reversible

A brain-computer interface uses AI to interpret brain signals from the movements used in handwriting, converting them to text at a rate of 90 characters per minute

The UK and Israel are already considering booster vaccine programmes and are buying up doses, but topping up on covid-19 vaccines isn't as straightforward as it sounds

Whale sharks are the world’s largest fish but they can suspend themselves upright while feeding at the water’s surface by sucking in enough air to float

An artificial intelligence that mimics how people type on a smartphone – including making errors – could help improve the standard of on-screen keyboards in the future

In 2018, hundreds of slabs of rubber washed up on the Brazilian coastline – they have been identified as cargo from the shipwrecked SS Rio Grande from the second world war

The Cerne Abbas Giant carved into an English hillside seems to date to the late Saxon period or early Medieval times, and may have been hidden by grass for centuries

The giant squid is famously elusive, but researchers have captured the first known footage of it hunting by using a decoy jellyfish attached to a camera

High winds are reported to have broken a glass-bottomed bridge in China, leaving a man clinging to a handrail above a 91-metre drop – but just how safe is glass as a bridge-building material?

The latest coronavirus news updated every day including coronavirus cases, the latest news, features and interviews from New Scientist and essential information about the covid-19 pandemic