New Scientist Space - Space Headlines

From chess to nuclear war planning, Kelly Clancy takes a wide-ranging look at how games and gaming have changed society in Playing With Reality

Creating "walled gardens", much like TV channels do, would provide children better tools to navigate a lifetime of social media than banning smartphones altogether

Unique cell responses mean some people may be immune to catching the coronavirus, even if they are unvaccinated

A material made of liquid salt mixed with polymers is extremely stretchy but still as strong as the plastics used to make water bottles

The New Horizons mission to Pluto, now zooming out of the Kuiper belt, has made a discovery that could upend what we know about where the solar system ends

A giant flower, one of the smelliest in the world, is currently blooming at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Radiation surveys suggest that it is now safe to grow food on farmland that has been unused since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but changing its status would face local opposition in Ukraine

Humans may have shaped the development of aromatic herbs like lavender and mint, but did herbs also shape our own evolution?

The chemical composition of Pluto and Triton suggests they originated in the same region of the outer solar system before the latter was pulled into Neptune’s orbit

Driverless cars seem to have fewer accidents than human drivers under routine conditions, but higher crash risks when turning or in dim light – although researchers say more accident data is necessary

There are many scary claims about excess time on digital devices for children and teenagers. Here’s a guide to the real risks - and what to do about them

A 19th-century thought experiment that was once thought to defy the laws of thermodynamics has now been realised to make molecules accumulate on one side of a U-bend

There are so many Russian landmines across Ukraine that removing them could take 700 years. To prioritise areas for de-mining, the Ukrainian government has turned to an artificial intelligence model that can identify the most important regions

Cashew nut shells are a source of low-emissions biofuel, which is being tested in several ships, but it is unlikely there will be enough to make much of a dent in the industry’s emissions

Extremely cold atoms that perpetually move in repeating patterns could be a promising building block for quantum computers

Not content with shapes in two or three dimensions, mathematicians like to explore objects in any number of spatial dimensions. Now they have discovered shapes of constant width in any dimension, which roll like a wheel despite not being round

Tribalism can be toxic, yet we need more of it if we are to meet today’s global challenges, argues one anthropologist. His research reveals how to create a “teratribe”

A robot named Musashi with a human-like "skeleton" and "musculature" can perform basic driving tasks – but this isn’t the safest approach to autonomous transport

By combining two approaches to quantum computing into one device, Google has been able to simulate the behaviour of magnets in detail - and found discrepancies with our current understanding of certain magnet systems

A US military program led by DARPA is modifying the stimulant drug dextroamphetamine so it can be switched on or off in the brain using near-infrared light, avoiding risks like addiction