New Scientist Space - Cosmology

Intensive breeding since the 19th century has created thousands of varieties of rose, but a reduction in genetic diversity could leave them vulnerable to diseases and climate change

When fetuses and babies were exposed to sound stimuli, their brains' subsequent electrical activity appeared to be more complicated in the females than the males

More than 1.4 billion people live in India, giving its healthcare system a major role in planetary well-being. In the past 10 years, prime minister Narendra Modi has worked to improve India's healthcare, but there is still much work to be done

India currently has a fairly small chip-manufacturing industry, but prime minister Narendra Modi wants the country to become a dominant player in the sector in just a few years

Almost all moon landers break down during the extraordinary cold of lunar night, but Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon has astonishingly survived three nights

The very weak forces of attraction caused by the Casimir effect can now be used to manipulate microscopic gold flakes and turn them into a light-trapping tool

Targeted culling of crown-of-thorns starfish has resulted in parts of the Great Barrier Reef maintaining and even increasing coral cover, leading researchers to call for the programme to be dramatically scaled up

AI companies are trying to impose safety measures on their chatbots, while researchers are finding ways around them all the time. Where will this end, asks Alex Wilkins

Feedback is pleased to see that researchers are looking into the urgent issue of which angle blood might travel at following a violent act in space

Cancer has been one of the world's most feared diseases for decades. But this "cancerphobia" no longer matches the evidence and is doing great harm, argues David Ropeik

Thomas Metzinger's The Elephant and the Blind explores deep meditation, which can take us to states where the sense of self vanishes, arguing that this may be crucial in cracking consciousness

Some environmental campaigners claim that attempts to create a circular economy for plastics are doomed to fail – but the arguments can be disingenuous

Using genomic data from more than 9500 species, biologists have mapped the evolutionary relationships between flowering plants

Two important barriers to a stable, powerful fusion reaction have been leapt by an experiment in a small tokamak reactor, but we don’t yet know if the technique will work in larger devices

The Large Hadron Collider is testing entanglement in a whole new energy range, probing the meaning of quantum theory – and the possibility that an even stranger reality lies beneath

Obese mice that lost weight on a low-fat diet before getting a flu shot had better immune responses than those that lost weight afterwards, suggesting diet and weight loss influence vaccine efficacy

A set of large, distinctive footprints suggest a raptor dinosaur that lived in East Asia 96 million years ago grew to a length of 5 metres

Six full-body fossils of Ptychodus sharks have been formally analysed for the first time, revealing that they were fast swimmers that preyed on shelled creatures

Climate change’s effects on ocean water temperatures and salinity could shrink sonar detection ranges underwater and make it more challenging to spot submarines

Amazon says it will create new jobs to replace roles taken over by machines, but it isn’t clear whether this will happen quickly enough