From nuclear strikes to giant spikes, discover the systems in place to prevent a collision and test your decision-making to see if you could avoid a catastrophic impact

From just listening to reframing the situation, there are a few ways you can help someone with a negative outlook, says advice columnist David Robson

The controversies surrounding football’s video assistant referee (VAR) system highlight our troubled relationship with uncertainty – and point to potential solutions

Reaching net-zero emissions is essential for halting climate change - but even after we achieve this goal, parts of the planet will continue to warm. Delaying net zero will worsen these effects

Never underestimate what a single gopher can achieve in a day: one of the burrowing mammals helped boost soil fungi in an area blanketed by ash from the explosive eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington state

Extreme weather and a growing population is driving a food security crisis. What can we do to break the vicious cycle of carbon emissions, climate change and soaring food costs – or is it already too late?

Experiments show that illuminating the underside of a decoy seal reduces attacks by great white sharks, revealing a possible strategy to protect surfers and swimmers

Most assessments of global warming use 1850-1900 as a baseline, but researchers have now established a new pre-industrial reference by using Antarctic ice cores to estimate the average temperature before 1700

Droplets of fluid have been known to hover above a hot surface, but a new experiment suggests the same can happen to tiny jets of liquid too

SpaceX is preparing for the sixth test flight of Starship, the world's most powerful rocket. Next week's launch – if successful – will be the fastest turnaround yet

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

AI and Google Street View have created 'digital twins' of living trees in North American cities – part of a huge simulation that could help make urban tree planting and trimming decisions

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

DNA from bones found in a cave in Germany has been identified as from Homo sapiens, showing that our species endured frigid conditions there as they expanded across the continent

A Greek philosopher’s musings on pleasure, contained in ancient papyrus scrolls buried by Mount Vesuvius’s eruption 2000 years ago, have been rediscovered with the help of AI

3D mapping and artificial intelligence has helped decipher an ancient Herculaneum papyrus scroll which had been digitally scanned

Our hominin ancestors originated in Africa and the consensus is that they didn't leave there until about 1.8 million years ago, but stone tools found in Jordan challenge the idea

A stone wall nearly a kilometre long found under the Baltic Sea may have been built by ancient hunters to channel deer into a confined space

A 2200-year-old burial ground in northern Italy includes people interred with dogs and horses, perhaps showing they had strong bonds with their animals

As organic material in a bone gets replaced by minerals over time, it becomes a fossil. But that can happen at different rates even within the same individual

New archaeological evidence shows that ancient humans ate each other surprisingly often - sometimes for compassionate reasons. The finds give us an opportunity to reassess our views on the practice

A genetic study of nearly 2700 individuals has revealed the ancestry of Indian people, and gets scientists closer to reconstructing the genomes of ancient Neanderthals

Lake sediments reveal the ancient history of Aboriginal people’s use of fire to manage the landscape, a tradition that has benefits for biodiversity

Wooden tablets containing a language of glyphs called Rongorongo may be evidence that the people of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, created their own writing system without the influence of European language

Most people are too risk-averse when it comes to life's biggest choices. Learning how to overcome the cognitive biases at play can help you make better decisions - with no looking back

A southern mammoth skeleton found in Spain bears cut marks from stone tools and bite marks from carnivore teeth, suggesting that both hominins and felids feasted on its meat

Evidence from an archaeological site in Ethiopia suggests ancient humans adapted their diet during a dry spell after the Toba volcano eruption 74,000 years ago

Feedback is intrigued by new research into how major sports tournaments "were associated with increases in the number of babies born" nine months later - but only for supporters of the winning teams

Birthrates are projected to have fallen below the replacement level, of 2.1 per woman, in more than three quarters of countries by 2050

Why childhood is so protracted has long been mysterious, now a spate of archaeological discoveries suggest an intriguing explanation

Can cultivating positive behaviours and tweaking our lifestyles lead to healthier, happier lives – even longer lives? Discover the daily choices that may make the difference in a fascinating new book

An excavation on an island in the Coral Sea shows that Indigenous Australians were producing ceramics long before the arrival of Europeans

Five years ago, a fossil found in the Philippines was determined to be from a new species of hominin called Homo luzonensis. Since then, we’ve learned a bit more about the newest member of the human family

In the foundations of a Maya temple, researchers found the charred bones of royal individuals – possibly evidence of a fiery ritual to mark the end of one dynasty and the beginning of another

The skull of Shanidar Z was found in the Shanidar cave in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and has been painstakingly put back together

Around 3000 years ago, several empires and kingdoms in the Mediterranean collapsed, with a group of sea-faring warriors implicated as the culprit. But new evidence shows that many of our ideas about this turbulent time need completely rethinking

Genetic analysis of 50,000-year-old Neanderthal skeletons has uncovered the remnants of three viruses related to modern human pathogens, and the researchers think they could be recreated

Outrunning prey over long distances is an efficient method of hunting for humans, and it was widely used until recently, according to an analysis of ethnographic accounts

Animal life on Earth existed for over half a billion years before hominins hit the scene – a complex combination of environmental changes, innovations in technology and competition may have led to us

Soil core samples show an ancient riverbed under the desert near many Egyptian pyramids, revealing an ancient waterway that dried up thousands of years ago

An experiment inspired by Homer’s description of combat in The Iliad tested the capabilities of the Dendra armour suit from Greece’s Bronze Age

Cut marks on a 4000-year-old skull suggest ancient Egyptian doctors tried to treat a man with nasopharyngeal cancer

Rock art along the Orinoco river in South America is made up of some of the largest etchings we know of and could date back 2000 years

Babies cannot tell us what they are experiencing, so it is hard to know what they are conscious of. But new research suggesting they perceive the world consciously could change how we care for them, says Claudia Passos-Ferreira

Rock art is a truly global phenomenon, with discoveries of cave paintings and etchings on every continent that ancient humans inhabited – but how many times was it invented over human history?

An urn found in a tomb in Spain contained the cremated remains of a man, a gold ring and about 5 litres of liquid, which has been identified as now-discoloured white wine

A fossil bone displaying features consistent with Down’s syndrome belonged to a Neanderthal child who survived beyond 6 years old, adding to evidence that these extinct humans cared for members of their community

Pictograms and petroglyphs depicting abstract lines and shapes offer a rare glimpse into the culture of people who lived in South America thousands of years ago

The skeletons of ancient Egyptian scribes reveal the health toll of sitting on the floor while performing administrative tasks like writing

Remote sensing, including lidar, reveals that the Amazon was once home to millions of people. The emerging picture of how they lived challenges ideas of human cultural evolution