New Scientist Space - Cosmology

NASA’s Perseverance rover recorded unusual sounds as a Martian dust devil passed directly over the robotic vehicle in 2021, and we now know they came from electrical activity in the storm

For years, Egyptologists have assumed pyramid tombs were just for the rich – but the burials at a site called Tombos don’t fit this pattern

A new way of estimating rural populations has found that we may be undercounting people who live in these areas, potentially inflating the global population beyond the official count of 8.2 billion – but not everyone agrees

NASA’s InSight lander recorded surprisingly large quakes that indicate Mars is more seismically active than we first thought. Mysteriously, they only happen during Martian summers

Analysing the aftermath of particle collisions has revealed two new instances of “CP violation”, a process that explains why our universe contains more matter than antimatter

Birds do it, chimps do it, even monarch butterflies do it – and by paying more attention to how animals self-medicate, we can find new treatments for ourselves

The wind on Saturn's largest moon is strong enough to blow around rocks of up to half a metre in diameter, which could put NASA's upcoming Dragonfly mission at risk

A private moon mission planned for 2027 will be the first step towards commercial lunar mining of rare and expensive helium-3

Scientists have long sought the particle that carries the force of gravity, but a new theoretical model tosses out that idea entirely – and shows how it could be tested in experiments

The Big Wheel, discovered using the James Webb Space Telescope, formed just 2 billion years after the big bang - surprisingly early for a spiral galaxy of a similar size to our Milky Way

Surveys that ask thousands of people how they spend their time have revealed some surprising activities that seem to make any given day a good one

We may be starting to get a grasp on what kick-started life on Earth – and it could help us search for it on other planets

A newly discovered mechanism could explain the shock finding last year that oxygen is produced by metallic nodules on the seafloor – and it might be happening on other planets, too

Can one single mathematical framework describe the motion of a fluid and the individual particles within it? This question, first asked in 1900, now has a solution that could help us understand the complex behaviour of the atmosphere and oceans.

A failed launch left a batch of Starlink satellites in the wrong orbit last year, and it appears that a fragment of one fell to Earth and hit a farm in Canada. Thankfully, no one was injured

New Scientist's revelation that a UK minister is asking ChatGPT for advice raises the question of what role these new AI tools should play in government – and whether we should really think of them as intelligent

It can be difficult to recall exactly when a specific event happened, and now it seems our memory can be tricked into pushing occurrences back in time, making us think they happened earlier than in reality

In a survey of AI researchers, most say current AI models are unlikely to lead to artificial general intelligence with human-level capabilities, even as companies invest billions of dollars in this goal

These brilliant images show how researchers in Switzerland are using weather-modification techniques to understand how ice crystals form in clouds, an important and poorly understood factor in climate and weather models

An analysis of changes to global ecosystems has revealed that almost nowhere is untouched by the influence of humanity, with more than 50 per cent of the planet's land mass experiencing "novel" conditions