The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) probe and XRISM X-ray space telescope blasted off from the Tanegashima Space Center on 7 September, sharing the same rocket to orbit | Continue reading
When NASA crashed its DART spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos, the goal was to shorten the space rock's orbit around its parent asteroid. The mission succeeded - but Dimorphos' orbit has continued to shrink and it isn't clear why | Continue reading
By fusing fungi and robots, researchers hope to create a sustainable and biodegradable skin capable of sensing a variety of stimuli, as demonstrated by a model of the Terminator | Continue reading
An explosion that was billions of times brighter than the sun but faded within a month may have occurred when a rare medium-sized black hole ate a star | Continue reading
Volunteers judged cartoon American football players to be slimmer when they had a lower number on their jersey | Continue reading
Today’s batteries lose efficiency – or “age” – through use, but theoretical quantum batteries might be immune to the problem if they are charged wirelessly | Continue reading
The life of polymath John von Neumann is woven into a strange work of fiction by rising literary star Benjamín Labatut that comes with a serious warning about the consequences of science | Continue reading
Lewis Burnett's powerful photographs of a saltwater crocodile, Risso's dolphins and a reef manta ray are part of a collection that won him the Portfolio prize in the 2023 Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year competition | Continue reading
A sophisticated attack on Bangladesh Bank left the world reeling as it became clear that the world's largest bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, was powerless to stop all of it. A smart documentary shows how state-sponsored cybercriminals are for hire, says Simon Ings | Continue reading
On its 50th anniversary, the standard model of particle physics remains an unfinished masterpiece. The quest to finally fill in the blanks should be treated not with frustration but joyful anticipation | Continue reading
Days of mass death on Earth are dramatically captured by Michael Benton in his book, Extinctions. It's well-told and gripping, but real palaeontology afficionados may crave newer stories | Continue reading
The World Health Organization caused an uproar last month when it held its first global summit on traditional and complementary medicines. We need to establish what works and what doesn't when it comes to these therapies, says Clare Wilson | Continue reading
Evidence shows our impact on the planet started long before 1950, the date chosen by the Anthropocene Working Group for the start of the new epoch, so I resigned from the group in protest, says Erle Ellis | Continue reading
Whatever your area of interest, it would seem sensible to learn from the best. Recent research disagrees, finds David Robson | Continue reading
Emulating the pulsating action of the human heart could increase the efficiency of everything from oil pipelines to central heating systems | Continue reading
A type of brain cell that behaves like a hybrid of neurons and glia has been spotted, and it could explain how some neurodegenerative conditions, such as Parkinson’s, develop | Continue reading
The global average temperature for June, July and August was 16.77°C (62.19°F), beating the previous record set in 2019 by almost three-tenths of a degree | Continue reading
Our amazing picture of the particles and forces that make reality took decades of invention and experiment to piece together | Continue reading
The classic depiction of the fundamental constituents of matter fails to accurately represent their relationships and what is missing – here’s how to do better | Continue reading
Leading physicists explain how they think we will discover the new particles or forces that would complete one of science's greatest unfinished masterpieces | Continue reading
Cannabis was one of the first crops that humans cultivated about 12,000 years ago. But medicinal and psychoactive uses are much more recent | Continue reading
Northern gannets show a consistent preference for one side or the other when diving to catch fish, with a roughly equal split between lefties and righties | Continue reading
Stone balls found at a site used by early humans about 1.4 million years ago didn’t become round after being used as hammers, but were intentionally knapped into spheres | Continue reading
Compared with monkeys, great apes have greater range of motion in their shoulders and elbows, which may help heavier primates climb down safely | Continue reading
Several AI chatbots were tested to see how well they could perform legal reasoning and tasks used by human lawyers in everyday practice – GPT-4 performed the best, but still wasn’t great | Continue reading
Removing some of the thick jelly layers surrounding spotted salamander eggs may help the embryos inside access more oxygen in the water | Continue reading
Many animals sense their surroundings in ways that are hard to imagine. Christie Taylor spoke to journalist Ed Yong about these different perspectives | Continue reading
Plain water, coffee or milk? Sports or energy drinks? Our ideas about what we ought to be drinking, and how much, are confounded by half-truths. Here's what the science says | Continue reading
An analysis of the sculpted shoes on the statues in China’s Terracotta Army, which dates back about 2200 years, suggests that their real-life soldier equivalents had surprisingly flexible footwear | Continue reading
Soaring US demand and high drug prices may be keeping the weight loss injections from other nations | Continue reading
Four years after Google first demonstrated the supremacy of quantum computers over ordinary ones, why aren't these exotic machines being used for practical problems? | Continue reading
The Chandrayaan-3 mission is officially complete, with both the rover and lander powering down for the lunar night, but the solar-powered hardware is expected to reawaken at sunrise | Continue reading
The proliferation of alien species costs the global economy more than $420 billion a year, and the problem is only growing | Continue reading
The shooting of Amarena, one of around 60 remaining Marsican brown bears in central Italy, raises doubts about whether large carnivores can coexist peacefully with humans | Continue reading
Fossilised remains of a 250-million-year-old animal are leading to a new understanding of how reptiles evolved in the wake of Earth’s largest mass extinction | Continue reading
A species of pirate spider in Costa Rica has a hunting strategy that has never been documented before in any spider | Continue reading
In Denali National Park, Alaska, a major road has been rapidly slipping down a mountain as the permafrost melts. Now, a huge project to build a bridge over the Pretty Rocks landslide has begun | Continue reading
The strange big-eared brown bat was discovered in Brazil's Atlantic Forest in 1916 and then apparently vanished - but it has now reappeared in a Brazilian grassland | Continue reading
A barn rigged with dozens of cameras and sensors could help scientists better understand the group dynamics and flight patterns of flocks of birds and swarms of insects | Continue reading
A generative AI model based on small datasets was able to create maps and 2D character models for video games on demand | Continue reading
T-cells that have been genetically edited to boost their anticancer activity have destroyed solid tumours in mice | Continue reading
The Aditya-L1 satellite will sit between the sun and Earth and provide constant observation data to scientists around the world | Continue reading
We have a bumper crop of new sci-fi books for you this September, including talking spy cats from John Scalzi, an amazing discovery in space from Stephen Baxter and a near-future novel by Sebastian Faulks, says culture editor Alison Flood | Continue reading
People with eczema may have higher levels of certain bacteria on their skin than people without the condition, with these microbes potentially offering a new target for treatments | Continue reading
Astrophysicist Avi Loeb and his team claim to be the first to have found fragments from an interstellar meteor, but other scientists are extremely sceptical | Continue reading
A genetic analysis suggests our ancestral population fell as low as around 1300 individuals nearly a million years ago, but other experts aren't convinced | Continue reading
Supplementing with antioxidants such as vitamins C and E could increase the formation of blood vessels within lung cancer tumours, helping them to grow bigger and spread, according to a study in mice | Continue reading
A balm used in the mummification of an ancient Egyptian who died 3500 years ago contains ingredients hinting at long-distance trade | Continue reading