The Polaris Dawn mission will include the first ever civilian spacewalk, and with a new spacesuit and no airlock, it may also be the most dangerous spacewalk ever

NASA is investigating a strange noise coming through the speaker on Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which has been beset with technical issues

Space missions are extremely hard. Things going wrong should be expected, so having a sensible plan B is crucial

A newly spotted asteroid named 2024 RW1 burned up in the atmosphere over the South Pacific, creating a spectacular bright flash in the sky over the Philippines just hours after first being detected

News of the asteroid 2024 RW1 impacting near the Philippines may have come as a shock this week, but space agencies and astronomers around the world are keeping an eye out to protect us

Greg Eghigian's After the Flying Saucers Came and Luis Elizondo's Imminent both show how our fascination with UFOs goes beyond simple curiosity

In between two spacecraft visiting Jupiter’s moon Io, a volcano spreading material over hundreds of kilometres has appeared

Gas bubbles on the surface of a star have been observed for the first time in detail outside our solar system, and they are 75 times the size of our sun

If you were standing on Mars as it was hit by charged particles from the sun, you might be able to see an aurora just like on Earth

The long-standing mystery of how supermassive black holes grew so huge so quickly could be solved by decaying dark matter

Spanning 23 million light years, or 220 Milky Way galaxies, a set of giant, newly discovered black hole jets known as Porphyrion may change our understanding of black holes and the structure of the universe

See the world's best space images from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 award

Nearly imperceptible quantum flickers used to limit how precisely we could detect the way space-time ripples, but squeezing the laser light used in detectors overcomes this and doubles the number of gravitational waves we can see

Genetic analysis shows that microbes growing inside the International Space Station have adaptations for radiation and low gravity, and may pose a threat to astronauts

A distant planet should have been consumed when its star expanded to become a red giant, perhaps offering insights into planetary migration

These dazzling images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are from the upcoming book Cosmos: Explore the wonders of the universe, which has a foreword by astrophysicist Becky Smethurst

Astronomer Jo Dunkley is planning to use the Simons Observatory to snare evidence for inflation, the theory that the universe expanded at incredible speed after its birth

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

The ion tail of C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) could appear as a blue streak across the northern hemisphere sky during October, in a rare event thought to happen only every few decades

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

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

The first “failed star” ever discovered has been a weird outlier since it was found nearly 30 years ago. New observations show that it is unusually massive because it isn’t a single star after all

Moin Hussain's debut feature film Sky Peals sees a man discover his father may be from outer space. Part sci-fi, part family drama, part coming-of-age tale, it is odd and otherworldly

Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who has worked on the JWST, catalogues the science behind its most stunning images in her new book, Webb's Universe. Here's her pick of the telescope’s best shots

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

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

Anil Ananthaswamy's Why Machines Learn: The elegant maths behind modern AI explores the mechanics of the AI revolution, but doesn't examine its ethics

AlphaProof, an AI from Google DeepMind, came close to matching the top participants in a prestigious competition for young mathematicians

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

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

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?

After their initial training phase, AI algorithms can’t update and learn from new data, meaning tech companies have to keep training new models from scratch

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

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

NASA’s Valkyrie is undergoing tests to understand what it would take to get a humanoid robot onto offshore facilities or into space. New Scientist's James Woodford took the controls to see what it is capable of

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

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

Artificial intelligence has more in common with ants than humans, says Neil Lawrence. Only by taking a more nuanced view of intelligence can we see how machines will truly transform society

CAPTCHA tests are supposed to distinguish humans from bots, but an AI system mastered the problem after training on thousands of images of road scenes

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

Voice assistants can build profiles of their users’ habits and preferences, but the consistency and accuracy of these profiles vary

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

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

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

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?