The emergence of the world’s most iconic predator remains a scientific mystery. This latest discovery offers a critical clue

After building a Truman Show experiment, scientists were able to predict the lifespans of their 81 subjects

It’s far less gross than it sounds (we promise) and could have major implications for how we understand anatomy and disease

How to earn, spend and save to regain control and achieve long-lasting happiness

Stephen Hawking spent much of his life pulling at a thread, one that had been swallowed by a black hole. He was interested in what happened to material once it passed a black hole’s event horizon – the point of no return, where gravity crushes anything that crosses it into an infinitesimally small point in space. Other theories hypothesise that if you fell in, your atoms would become part of this cosmic monster and reside there until the end of time. Hawking’s maths suggested something else, however. According to his calculations, black holes don’t last until the end of time. In fact, quantum mechanics suggests that a black hole would, over time, fizz away. Its particles would evaporate over aeons until a final, massive burst of energy. Why does this matter? Well, until this point, the prevailing idea in physics was that nothing is ever really destroyed. If we could somehow fish your atoms out of a black hole, and invent a machine that knew where to put them (like your pattern caught in a transporter buffer), we could, in theory, rebuild you. The death of a black hole, and the ultimate end of everything within it, seemed to violate this rule. Hawking had spotted a crack in our model of the Universe. The resolution to this problem that he settled on, after many intellectual battles with other theoretical physicists, was the ‘holographic principle’ (an idea first proposed by physicists Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind). It’s a headscratcher of an idea that suggests the Universe is actually a projection. In this issue, Thomas Hertog, one of Hawking’s closest science collaborators, takes a closer look at this idea. He thinks that we’re close to a discovery that will let us see Hawking’s maths play out in the real world. A discovery that could finally move us closer to a single, unified theory of everything.

With the right steps, it’s possible to put type 2 diabetes into remission and restore healthy blood glucose levels

There is no easy way, but there are some key things to do right

Scientists around the world are working on ways to hide us from sight. But how close are we to developing tech that could make us invisible?

You are what they eat, it turns out. So, here are five ways you can feed your gut’s microbes for effective weight loss.