Dear Readers, there have been some truly spectacular stories in New Scientist this year, and so here are some of favourites.

As you might expect from someone who usually has dozens of frogs in their pond in the spring, there were lots of tales about amphibians, including one with the best headline of 2024 – ‘Frogs have attempted sex with other species for millions of years‘. And this year also saw the discovery of the oldest tadpole fossil in the world.

And let’s not miss out reptiles – I was intrigued by accounts of crocodiles who seem to be triggered in a variety of ways by baby humans/bonobos crying. Spoiler alert – it’s not always about food!

And being Bug Woman, I am always interested in the smaller things of life and their vicissitudes, so this article about how insects managed to survive in a rainstorm was fascinating. Plus, it appears that insects play, and not just the highly-intelligent  bumblebees either, but little chaps like fruit flies, who appear to enjoy riding on a roundabout. There is so much we don’t know about the creatures that we share the planet with, including what they hell they are.

And  while we’re on the subject of intelligent  invertebrates, we can’t miss out the cephalopods, such as the octopi who not only hunt  with fish, but wallop any freeloading fish who don’t help out.

Then, there was a tale of some macaque monkeys living on an island in Thailand, who  came up with a whole new way of feeding themselves when tourists disappeared during the Covid pandemic.

And as I’ve been to the Azores to look for sperm whales this year, I was especially delighted to read that they might have the closest equivalent to human language of any animal yet investigated.

Although New Scientist provides a host of new information, it does occasionally seem to be stating the blooming obvious, as in this experiment where it was proved that dogs understand nouns. Not too much of a shock to dog owners, I’m sure, but then ‘knowing’ something intuitively and proving it scientifically are two different things.

And finally, something that will gladden the hearts of coffee fiends everywhere – coffee is actually good for you! Now they just have to prove the same for chocolate.