A lithium-ion battery made from three droplets of hydrogel is the smallest soft battery of its kind – and it could be used in biocompatible and biodegradable implants

Complex carbon-based molecules crucial to life on Earth originated somewhere in space, but we didn't know where. Now, huge amounts of them have been spotted in a huge, cold cloud of gas

A new supercapacitor design that uses only water, clay and graphene could source material on Mars and be more sustainable and accessible than traditional batteries

A new battery design that uses only water, clay and graphene could source material on Mars and be more sustainable and accessible than traditional batteries

What happens if AI is trained to write choral music by feeding it a specially created vocal dataset? Moving new exhibition The Call tackles some thorny questions about AI and creativity – and stirs the soul with music

Researchers have managed to encode enormous amounts of information, including images, into DNA at a rate hundreds of times faster than was previously possible

Google DeepMind has been using its AI watermarking method on Gemini chatbot responses for months – and now it’s making the tool available to any AI developer

A nearby star that exploded some 3 million years ago could have removed all dust smaller than a millimetre from the outer solar system

Current COVID-19 vaccines induce suboptimal respiratory mucosal immunity even after mRNA boosters (Declercq et al. and Lasrado et al., this issue).

COVID-19 mRNA booster vaccines induce limited mucosal immunity.

mRNA booster vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 induce circulating virus neutralizing antibodies that may enter the respiratory mucosa.

Mutation load and clonal hematopoiesis are similar between donors and recipients, even decades after hematopoietic cell transplantation.

Stromal reprograming by FAK inhibition overcomes RAS-MAPK inhibition resistance and enhances responses to therapy in pancreas cancer models.

Potent lysyl-tRNA synthetase inhibitors advance our understanding of desirable properties for achieving efficacy in cryptosporidiosis animal models.

Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who has worked on the JWST, catalogues the science behind its most stunning images in her new book, Webb's Universe. Here's her pick of the telescope’s best shots

A type of mathematical problem that was previously impossible to solve can now be successfully analysed with artificial intelligence

Google’s NotebookLM tool is billed as an AI-powered research assistant and can even turn your text history into a jovial fake podcast. But it could also tempt you into narcissism and nostalgia, says Jacob Aron

AI models have safeguards in place to prevent them creating dangerous or illegal output, but a range of jailbreaks have been found to evade them. Now researchers show that writing backwards can trick AI models into revealing bomb-making instructions.

Moin Hussain's debut feature film Sky Peals sees a man discover his father may be from outer space. Part sci-fi, part family drama, part coming-of-age tale, it is odd and otherworldly

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week