New Scientist Space - Space Headlines

In this passage from the opening of Grace Chan’s sci-fi novel, the November read for the New Scientist Book Club, we are introduced to her protagonists as they spend time in a virtual utopia which is becoming increasingly tempting in a dying world

Grace Chan, author of Every Version of You, the November read for the New Scientist Book Club, explores the philosophical implications of the choices her characters make

The green mummified remains of a teenager buried in Italy 200 to 400 years ago have given us new insights into the preservative properties of copper

Interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS are exciting, but there is no reason to claim that they are evidence of alien spacecraft – sometimes a comet is just comet, says Robin George Andrews

Standard techniques for removing kidney stones often require repeated surgery, but a magnetic gel seems to make the process more efficient

President Donald Trump appears to have ordered a return to nuclear testing after decades of uneasy but effective treaties banning the practice – but will it actually happen?

Palaeontologists have argued for decades over whether certain fossils are young Tyrannosaurus rex or another species entirely – now they have strong evidence that the diminutive Nanotyrannus really existed

A new type of germanium superconductor could allow classical and quantum chips to be built into one device, creating better and more reliable quantum computers.

People who receive stem cell therapy within a week of their first heart attack have nearly a 60 per cent lower risk of developing heart failure years later

One of the Milky Way’s smallest galactic neighbours seems to have a supermassive black hole at its centre, upending assumptions that it was dominated by dark matter

Photographer Tim Flach's new book Feline explores the mysterious and irresistible world of cats, from the domesticated to the wild, and why we love them

Ochre artefacts found in Crimea show signs of having been used for drawing, adding to evidence that Neanderthals used pigments in symbolic ways

In Ed Sayers's breathtaking documentary, a global community of film-makers capture the wildlife in their local areas. It's a bold departure from the glossy perspective of traditional nature documentaries, says Simon Ings

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

The internet is not what it once was, with so many apps and websites mere shadows of themselves. Thankfully, the inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee, has a fix that we should adopt

Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022. In his new book, Doctorow lays out how tech companies have made our lives progressively worse, finds Matthew Sparkes

The US government's decision to stop supporting a telescope facility that would have given us unprecedented insight into the early universe is calamitous, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Feedback comes across a YouTuber's efforts to build a large language model in Minecraft and is impressed at the scale of it – even if it doesn't quite live up to its promise to blow your mind "in spectacular fashion"

COP's negotiations this month will focus on money for climate change adaptation. While more money is essential, even a big increase won't be enough on its own and we need to face up to this, warns Susannah Fisher

Can sea slugs form abstract thoughts? Do we dare to see any "purpose" in evolution? Is the subjective just a complicated form of the objective? Nikolay Kukushkin's One Hand Clapping is a bold voyage around the mysteries of the human mind, finds Thomas Lewton