Our cover story on ADHD, from May 2023, was one of our most-read features of the year
To read our top five feature articles of 2023, click through to an article and follow the prompts to register with New Scientist for free.
This year, as ever, our editors and reporters have been leafing through the pages of scientific journals and patrolling conferences, hunting down the smartest new ideas in science. That has resulted in a truckload of great feature articles, including stories on the wildest concepts in the foundations of physics, authoritative reporting on the human mind and must-read environmental coverage. Normally, these stories are only available to subscribers, but as a holiday gift to you, we have curated some of the very best of the crop from 2023 and, for a limited time, they are free.
Why are cases of ADHD soaring?
The number of new diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been skyrocketing over the past few years, especially among adults. This prompts the question: have we been neglecting the legitimate needs of a vast number of people, or is the rise a reflection of our tendency to over-medicalise normal differences in people’s brains? Our regular freelance writer Caroline Williams wanted to find out, and since she suspects that she has ADHD herself, this story also became a refreshingly frank journey to understand her own mind. She discovered that we are probably still underdiagnosing ADHD in many countries – and that there are emerging ways of finding out whether you have it that don’t depend on the subjective opinion of a doctor. It still feels like everyone is talking about this condition and, indeed, this piece proved to be one of our most-read features of the year.
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Five ways of thinking
Thinking about thinking is really hard. Try it now. Do you see images? Can you hear a voice talking to you, or is everything silent? Perhaps you can’t conjure up anything concrete at all, instead thinking in more nebulous ways. Studying the act of thought isn’t for the faint-hearted, but researchers are endeavouring to do so and are turning up all sorts of weird and wonderful insights about the inner workings of the mind. This feature helped readers discover how their own thoughts compare with those of others, why there are five different types of thinking and how the way you think influences the way you behave. No wonder it was among our most popular articles of the year.
Is the entire universe a single quantum object?
You could view the whole history of fundamental physics as being about reductionism, the idea that we can understand the universe by breaking everything down into its constituent parts. Taking this approach has worked extremely well so far. We discovered that chairs are made of atoms, and those atoms are made of protons, and those protons are made of quarks. Ultimately, this method has resulted in the standard model of particle physics, our peerless description of the particles and forces that make up reality. It also enables us to partition reality into packages that function at different energy scales, making everything easier to study.
Yet this feature boldly questions the whole edifice of reductionism. Recently, a handful of physicists have become convinced that the approach is preventing us from reaching a deeper picture of reality. They are experimenting with new kinds of theories that allow the layers of reality to bleed into one another. The maths of the “UV/IR mixing” concept they are toying with is, admittedly, challenging, but worth sticking with to reach a radical philosophical conclusion: we can, quite literally, see the entire universe in its tiniest pieces and particles.
The mystery of the cold tongue
With all the doom and gloom surrounding climate change, it isn’t surprising that many people are experiencing crisis fatigue. Yet now, more than ever, we need to engage with the issues. This year, New Scientist published some articles that got readers clicking like never before. They included this intriguing feature about the “mystery of the cold tongue”, which explores why a swathe of the eastern Pacific Ocean is defying climate models’ predictions by getting colder, not hotter. This has been called “the most important unanswered question in climate science”, and the best brains in the field are racing to crack it. No wonder. The cold tongue has global implications, including influencing droughts in the US, wildfires in Australia, monsoons in India and famine in the Horn of Africa. We need to understand what is causing it to know which future to prepare for.
Rethinking the birth of civilisation
Homo sapiens is a very strange species. That much is apparent when you consider things like our use of language, creation of art and unequalled intelligence. But some of our eccentricities are less obvious. Take the fact that, around 10,000 years ago, our ancestors ditched a lifestyle that had worked successfully for 300,000 years in favour of a new one: they moved from hunting and gathering to farming, starting a process of civilisation that culminated in literature, medicine, rock music, the internet and climate change. No other animal has ever done anything like this. But the neat story of how humans made this transition has been comprehensively undermined by new evidence. As this article reveals, we are being forced to retell our own origin story.
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