New Scientist Space - Space Headlines

The concept of nothing once sparked a 1000-year-long war, today it might explain dark energy and nothingness even has the potential to destroy the universe, explains physicist Antonio Padilla

Under pressure from Elon Musk’s DOGE task force, NASA is cancelling grants and contracts for everything from lunar dust research to educational programmes

Even animals with very small brains turn out to have cultural traditions, which poses a puzzler for biologists wondering what makes human culture unique

As semaglutide-based weight loss treatments such as Ozempic and Wegovy become more popular, new side effects are emerging – and one is hair loss

Urine that has sat in the sun for a while seems to fertilise crops while warding off pests, without affecting the produce's taste

At the Dakshineswar temple complex in India, Hanuman langurs beg for food by grabbing visitors’ legs or tugging on their clothes – and they don’t stop until they get their favourite snacks

After a container ship struck and destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, researchers began calculating the risks of similar catastrophic incidents for other US bridges – and they’re surprisingly high

Cave-dwelling orb spiders have adapted their webs so they act as tripwires for prey that crawl on the walls of the caves

By studying the brains of autistic girls, we now know the condition presents differently in them than in boys, suggesting that huge numbers of women have gone undiagnosed

An eavesdropper hiding inside a black hole could still obtain information about quantum objects on its outside, a finding that reveals how effectively black holes destroy the quantum states near their event horizons

Paranthropus was an ape-like hominin that survived alongside early humans for more than a million years. A fossilised leg belonging to a strikingly small member of the group raises questions about how it did so

The rate at which the planet is warming has sped up since 2010, and now researchers say that China's efforts to clean up air pollution are inadvertently responsible for the majority of this extra warming

Taking aspirin was first linked to a lower risk of colorectal cancer in 1988, but the research into its anti-tumour potential has been full of twists and turns since then

Since the second world war, US economic prosperity and major technological developments have hinged upon the government’s commitment to funding scientific research. The Trump administration is ending that

The US has confirmed more than 480 measles cases across 19 states, the highest total since an outbreak in 2019 sickened more than 1200 people

Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe asteroid 2024 YR4, which earlier this year seemed to be at risk of hitting Earth in 2032. Earth is now safe, but astronomers are cheering on a possible collision with the moon

The long-standing question of how animals came to have an anus may have been solved by studies of which genes are active during development in various animals

Some researchers propose that countries should start to rack up a carbon debt once they exceed their carbon budget, obliging them to do more to draw down carbon dioxide, but the idea is unlikely to form part of international climate agreements

When researchers asked people to work on a computer with their phones 1.5 metres away, the amount of time they spent on their phone went down – but they just scrolled social media on their laptop instead

Red specks in the early universe are puzzling astronomers, but a proposed explanation suggests they are the progenitors of supermassive black holes