Andrew McConnell's otherworldly photograph captures a Russian cosmonaut in front of the just-landed Soyuz MS spacecraft in Kazakhstan's remote grasslands

The European Space Agency is sending a probe to get a closer look at the asteroid Dimorphos, which had its orbit altered by NASA’s DART mission in 2022

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

The European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft must be thoroughly tested before being sent to investigate the aftermath of the collision of NASA's DART probe with Dimorphos

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

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

The Euclid space telescope's massive “cosmic atlas” promises to shed light on fundamental questions in physics and cosmology

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

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

Dangerous radiation reaches Mars at levels we aren't exposed to on Earth, which makes the Red Planet a particularly dangerous place to be during pregnancy

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

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

Electromagnetic radiation leaking from the cable between your computer and monitor can be intercepted and decoded by AI to reveal what you are looking at

Between 2005 and 2021, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were more likely to make policy changes in the weeks after negative stories in the media

In Still Wakes the Deep, you play as a Glaswegian electrician on a 1970s oil rig. The well-crafted setting gives way to horror, but I wish I could linger in mundanity for longer, says Jacob Aron

Roads with variable speed limits, designed to manage traffic flow, are normally adjusted according to simple rules, but a 27-kilometre section of the I-24 freeway near Nashville, Tennessee, is now overseen by an artificial intelligence

A robot mimics the clever fin-folding mechanism used by tuna fish, which increased the bot's turning velocity by almost 33 per cent

To address the problem of AIs generating inaccurate information, a team of ethicists says there should be legal obligations for companies to reduce the risk of errors, but there are doubts about whether it would work

Plans to create an interactive AI model of the legendary code breaker Alan Turing are reckless and problematic, says Matthew Sparkes

AI companies hope that feeding ever more data to their models will continue to boost performance, eventually leading to human-level intelligence. Behind this hope is the "transformer", a key breakthrough in AI, but what happens if it fails to deliver?

The US military has prioritised deploying high-altitude balloons that can carry out surveillance

A neural network can recreate the classic computer game Doom despite using none of its code or graphics, hinting that generative AI could be used to create games from scratch in future

A new procedure turns an alloy of nickel and titanium into a material as strong as steel but 20 times stretchier – and one application could be building planes with shape-shifting wings

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

The author of Sapiens has turned his attention to the information networks that shape our societies, but when you stop and think about what he's saying, it's obvious

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

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

A powerful new AI called o1 is the most dangerous that OpenAI has ever released, the firm claims – but who are these warnings for, asks Chris Stokel-Walker

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

Google, Microsoft and others have taken big steps towards error-free devices, hinting that quantum computers that solve real problems aren’t far away

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

Google DeepMind claims its AlphaChip AI method can deliver “superhuman” chip designs that are already used in its data centres – but independent experts say public proof is lacking

Machines are fighting machines on the Ukrainian battlefield, as a technological arms race has given birth to a new way to wage war

Smartphones have indeed created an "anxious generation", but it isn't young people, it is their parents, argues neuroscientist Dean Burnett

In What's Next? Bill Gates digs into AI, climate, inequality, malaria and more. But the man looms too large for alternative solutions to emerge, says Bethan Ackerley

Gears just a few micrometres wide can be carved from silicon using a beam of electrons, enabling tiny robots or machines that could interact with human cells

Two of the three science Nobel prizes in 2024 have been won by people working in AI, but does this mean that AI models are now vital for science?

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

Autonomous taxis are already operating on US streets, while Elon Musk has spent years promising a self-driving car and failing to deliver. The newly announced Tesla Cybercab is unlikely to change that

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

While quantum computers are still in their infancy, more and more people are training to become quantum software developers

AI models have safeguards in place to prevent them creating dangerous or illegal output, but a range of jailbreaks have been found to evade them. Now researchers show that writing backwards can trick AI models into revealing bomb-making instructions.

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

A specialised algorithm could help autonomous vehicles track hidden objects, such as a pedestrian, a bicycle or another vehicle concealed behind a parked car