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

As the space industry evolves, we need a new set of international regulations to decide who is responsible for safety, the number of satellites in space, and more

Exoplanets in binary star systems usually orbit both stars, but astronomers have now spotted three planets orbiting one or the other star in a pair

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

Astronomers listened for radio signals emanating from planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, but found no evidence of any interplanetary communications

Astronomers have detected an exoplanet around Barnard’s star, one of the sun’s closest neighbours, but it is too hot for liquid water or life

The first 18 satellites of a planned Chinese mega constellation are brighter than all but 500 stars in the sky, raising fears of a huge impact on astronomy

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

Bacteria grown from carbon compounds in asteroids could be turned into a kind of nutritionally balanced milkshake

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 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

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

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

A small world in the outer solar system appears to have volcanic activity possibly spurred by liquid water

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

In order to figure out how something came from nothing, we first need to explore the different types of nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An AI-powered model found that approaching intersections more slowly could lower yearly US carbon emissions by up to around 123 million tonnes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Motion sensors in smartphones can be turned into makeshift microphones to eavesdrop on conversations, outsmarting security features designed to stop such attacks

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

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.

Google’s NotebookLM tool is billed as an AI-powered research assistant and can even turn your text history into a jovial fake podcast. But it could also tempt you into narcissism and nostalgia, says Jacob Aron

Google DeepMind has been using its AI watermarking method on Gemini chatbot responses for months – and now it’s making the tool available to any AI developer

Scientists used AI to transform tourist photos into a 3D digital map of Antarctic penguin colonies – even as researchers debate whether to harness or discourage tourism in this remote region