New Scientist Space - Cosmology

Buoys fitted with cartoon-like eyes act a little like scarecrows, keeping seabirds safely away from areas of the sea where they might get caught in fishing nets

The Mary Rose, a warship that sank off the south coast of England about 475 years ago, carried some crew members who may have come from North Africa

We mostly tell textures apart by their surface characteristics, but now we know that the human fingertip can sense molecular changes, even if it’s just a single swapped atom

The preserved remains of an ancient squid-like animal suggest it was eating the moulted skin of a crustacean when it was itself partially eaten by a larger animal like a shark

Saccharomycodes ludwigii is a sexually reproducing species, but it doesn’t mix up its genes before it mates – which means offspring end up being almost identical to the parents

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Do aliens exist?  If there is intelligent alien life out there, why haven’t we heard from them yet?  Or have we?

The hydrogen that accounts for around 10 per cent of our body mass was formed 13.8 billion years ago

The remains of a Viking have been rediscovered after being missing for over a century – and it turns out the Viking in question was buried wearing a pair of fancy long trousers

Bats have an internal sense of the speed of sound that they use to calculate the distance to perches or prey with echolocation, and it seems to be something they don’t have to learn

The Ingenuity helicopter has made its fourth flight on Mars, the furthest and fastest it’s travelled so far – and its mission has been extended to allow more tests

Itching is associated with many diseases and in some cases can be debilitating, but diagnosing chronic itching is difficult because there is no objective way to measure the sensation - now a wearable sensor could help

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has flown the closest to the sun of any spacecraft, at a remarkable speed that would allow it to circle Earth in under 5 minutes

After NASA selected SpaceX to land humans on the moon in 2024, its competitors Blue Origin and Dynetics filed complaints with the US government

Driftwood can be transformed into a material called "hard carbon" and used in sodium-ion batteries to power electric cars

A survey shows a region of Saudi Arabia is home to 1000 monuments that may all date back 7000 years, and that seem to have been used for ritual activities

Fossil pollen records show a surge of regrowth in forests of the Amazon basin 300 to 600 years before Europeans arrived, suggesting Indigenous people may have left the region

Feral horses and donkeys in the Sonoran desert in North America dig their own wells, inadvertently providing a water source for other animals and increasing biodiversity in the area

In North America, mice in both New York and Alberta are larger than their southern cousins and make large nests that insulate against colder northern winters