How did the supermassive black holes we’re now seeing in the early universe get so big so fast? Astrophysicist Sophie Koudmani is using sophisticated galaxy simulations to figure it out

A detector on the International Space Station found signatures of unexpectedly abundant antimatter – which may have been created in clashes of dark matter particles

My first sight of Saturn through a telescope inspired my love of space. Dig out your telescopes or visit your local astronomy club, and you may be lucky enough to spot our sixth planet's stunning thick band of rings, says Leah Crane

A 6000-kilogram spacecraft will embark on a six-year journey to Jupiter to explore whether its icy moon Europa has the conditions to support life

Meet NASA’s NEO Surveyor, the space telescope identifying hazardous asteroids and comets within 48 million kilometres of Earth’s orbit

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

The largest and most ambitious Martian drone yet could carry kilograms of scientific equipment over great distances and set itself down on the Red Planet unassisted

Asteroids that regularly fly between Earth, Venus and Mars could provide radiation shielding for human missions to explore neighbouring planets

Averting an asteroid strike will need many of the same skills we must hone to tackle climate change and future pandemics

Data collected by the Zhurong rover and orbiting satellites suggests the existence of an ancient shoreline in the Utopia Planitia region of Mars

Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, giving us our only up-close look at the planet – but unusual space weather just before the craft arrived has given us a misleading idea about the planet’s magnetic field

You might have heard about plans to establish a self‑sustaining city on Mars. Here’s what life would really be like on the Red Planet

Samantha Harvey has won the UK's top fiction prize for a novel that takes place over 24 hours on the International Space Station

A Spot robot equipped with a blowtorch can locate weeds on farms and precisely heat them up to stop them growing, offering a possible alternative to herbicides

Combining two neural networks has helped researchers predict potentially disastrous collapses in complex systems, such as financial crashes or power blackouts

The first ever full-scale demonstration of a nuclear reactor designed to passively cool itself in an emergency was a success, showing that it should be possible to build nuclear plants without the risk of dangerous meltdown

Many people enjoy the experience of using AIs like ChatGPT or voice assistants like Alexa to find out information, but it turns out doing so makes it less likely you will spot inaccurate information

Computer code dating back to the 1960s is still vital to banks, airlines and governments, but programmers familiar with the language are in short supply. Now AI models are being trained to fill the skills gap

Researchers trained a polymer gel to play the computer game Pong by passing electric current through it and measuring the concentration of ions

A cyberterrorism charge in Pakistan connected to riots in the UK illustrates how authorities are reaching across borders to tackle disinformation, but bringing overseas suspects to justice won't always be possible

Advances in generative AI mean fake images, videos, audio and bots are now everywhere. But studies have revealed the best ways to tell if something is real

Google has built a quantum computer that makes fewer errors as it is scaled up, and this may pave the way for machines that could solve useful real-world problems for the first time

As misinformation about the upcoming US elections rockets across social media, creating chaos, companies need to be honest about where this content is coming from, says Annalee Newitz

Supremacy, a new book from tech journalist Parmy Olson, takes us inside the rise of machine learning and AI, and examines the people behind it

Experiments show that viewers can usually identify video deepfakes of famous politicians – but fake audio and text are harder to detect

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. This time, Rowan Hooper takes us to the early 2030s, when a technological step change enabled us to produce all the food we needed without the use of animals

Cyborg: A documentary tells the intriguing story of Neil Harbisson, who wears an antenna to “hear” colour, but it is lacking in depth and should have probed its subject more, says Simon Ings

An artificial intelligence model that can identify the calls of eight whale species is helping researchers track the elusive whale behind a perplexing sound in the Pacific

A new design for a nuclear battery that generates electricity from the radioactive decay of americium is unprecedentedly efficient

A quantum computing protocol makes it possible to extract energy from seemingly empty space, teleport it to a new location, then store it for later use

We're trying to avert Judgment Day yet again – this time in an anime series for Netflix. But striking visuals can't make up for shortcomings in narrative and character development

Using more training data and computational power is meant to make AIs more reliable, but tests suggest large language models actually get less reliable as they grow

It has become trivially easy to use artificial intelligence to edit images or generate video to remove unwanted objects or beautify scenes, but doing so leads to people misremembering what they have seen

What if tech bros ruled the world, asks Asif Kapadia's 2073. This docudrama is captivating and disturbing, but lacks enough heft to stand out

A US standards agency has issued new guidance saying organisations shouldn’t require users to change their passwords periodically – advice that is backed up by decades of research

If artificial intelligence chatbots are fine-tuned to improve their responses using human feedback, they can become more likely to give deceptive answers that seem right but aren’t

AI chatbots from Google and Microsoft sometimes parrot disinformation when answering questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – but their performance depends on language and changes over time

Hurricane Helene hit a quartz mine in North Carolina that is key to global semiconductor production, which could impact the entire tech industry. Here is everything we know so far

The 2024 Nobel prize in physics has gone to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for discoveries that enabled machine learning and are key to the development of artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT

It is thought that humans can only maintain relationships with around 150 people, a figure known as Dunbar's number, but it seems that AI models can outstrip this and reach consensus in far bigger groups

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. We visit 2032 and meet artificial animals that love their owners, without the carbon footprint of biological pets. Rowan Hooper explains how it happened

A new way to store numbers in computers can dynamically prioritise accuracy or range, depending on need, allowing software to quickly switch between very large and small numbers

A simulator for the process of scientific discovery shows that AI models still fall short of human scientists and engineers in coming up with hypotheses and carrying out experiments on their own

Next-generation phone networks could dramatically outperform current ones thanks to a new technique for transmitting multiple streams of data over a wide range of frequencies

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

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

Large language models can be used to scam humans, but AI is also susceptible to being scammed – and some models are more gullible than others

The US Census Bureau processes data before publishing it in order to keep personal information private – but a new approach could maintain the same privacy while improving accuracy

Thanks to artificial intelligence, understanding animals may be closer than we think. But we may not like what they are going to tell us, says RSPCA chief executive Chris Sherwood

I have a confession to make. After taking a handful of autonomous taxi rides, I have gone from a hater to a friend of robot cars in just a few weeks, says Annalee Newitz