New Scientist Space - Cosmology

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

Rowan Hooper met ecologist Suzanne Simard under an oak tree in Kew Gardens, London, to talk about her new book, criticism of her work, and getting a call from James Cameron's people

Asteroid 2026JH2 has enough mass to wipe out a city and will zoom past Earth next week

Asteroid 2026JH2 will zoom past Earth at a distance of only 90,000 kilometres next week. It has enough mass to wipe out a city, but simulations suggest there is no chance of an impact for at least the next century

After a career spent grappling with the neural underpinnings of autism, Uta Frith is unwavering in her controversial call to scrap our current view of the condition and start again

Six teeth roughly 400,000 years old have yielded some of the first ancient proteins thought to belong to Homo erectus, providing molecular clues to their relationships with other hominins

Genetically altered bacteria can synthesise gadusol, a naturally occurring compound found in zebrafish eggs that could be developed as an alternative to existing sunscreen products that can harm marine life

Government departments and other public bodies in the UK must consider requests to release information about AI-produced content, regulators have confirmed. The move follows a successful request by New Scientist for the release of a minister's ChatGPT logs

We’ve long tried to control the weather by engineering rainfall. Now such cloud-seeding efforts are escalating, creating conflict between countries and stoking conspiracy theories. But do they work?

Carbon credits bought by companies to offset their emissions really have reduced deforestation, but not by as much as credit developers claim, according to a rigorous analysis

PCOS will now be known as PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome), and for Alice Klein, who has the condition, it's been a long time coming

The concept of a field plays a key role in particle physics, but what exactly is it? From its origins in the study of magnetism to the quantum fields of today, columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein goes exploring

Gases collected from boiling mineral springs in Zambia contain the chemical signature of having come directly from the Earth’s mantle, a sign of a rupture in the tectonic plates and the possible beginning of a new continental boundary

An analysis of ancient human artefacts finds that the container, a simple but critical tool, may have originated 500,000 years ago. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how slings, ostrich eggs and wooden trays helped our ancestors survive

A US start-up is putting autonomous data centres in the ocean, powered by wave energy, but experts warn that the harsh environment could make maintenance challenging

The rules governing gravity and other laws of nature seem like eternal truths, but cosmologist João Magueijo has always questioned their origins. Now, he has a bold new proposal

Genetic analysis of 1039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and the Norman conquest highlights the impact of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the island’s ancestry

Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system

If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic intervention – building a 130-kilometre-wide dam between the US and Russia

The US Department of Defense has released hundreds of documents and photographs related to UFOs, some of which have been declassified, in the first of many drops to come