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Our favourite wildlife shots, from hyenas to stingrays. Plus: a safer way to power boats.

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Wim van den Heever/naturepl.com

Wildlife photography

An inquisitive hyena pup sniffs out a camera in a national park in Kenya, while its mother keeps a watchful eye in the background. A southern stingray prowls a seabed at dawn off the coast of the Cayman Islands. And a fluorescent sap-sucking slug creeps off the coast of northern Indonesia. Marvel at all these wonders of nature and more. See the images.

Pushing the boat out

A robot boat with a propeller made from liquid magnets could be a safer alternative than one with solid metal blades, which can damage wildlife. Researchers attached two blobs of ferrofluid to opposite sides of a square acrylic plate that extended into water, with a platform to house a battery and electronics for electromagnets above. They found that when they triggered the ferrofluid to shift from side to side, at a rate of about nine times per second, the craft moved forward at around 2.7 millimetres per second. The softer nature of fluid-fluid interactions could reduce damage to wildlife if deployed in a real-life craft, the team says. Read more

To make their nighttime journeys, reindeer have evolved the ability to shift their eye colour as the seasons change to see better in the dark. Read about this and other wonders of the natural world with a New Scientist subscription.

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MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

In about 5 billion years, our sun is going to have swollen into a red giant, in its last stages of life before it dies. We used to think this process would wipe out Earth. But we have recently caught sight of the dying stages of other stars for the first time. And, miraculously, some planets seem to be able to survive these apocalyptic periods. It is challenging the story of how Earth will die and giving us hope that it might somehow outlast the sun. Read more

Tasmania's flora, fauna and geology: Australia

20 February 2024  |  12 days

Join us for a highly immersive expedition around the reserves, coasts, wetlands, rainforests, national parks and alpine landscapes of Tasmania, in search of its diverse wildlife, amazing flora and ancient geological features.

Abhijit Biswas at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on sending a cat video 31 million kilometres through space.

The New Scientist team will be taking a break for the holidays. The next daily newsletter will be in your inbox on 3 January. 

Happy holidays to those who celebrate. See you in 2024!

Alexandra Thompson

Assistant News Editor, New Scientist
Email me at newsletter@newscientist.com
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