New Scientist

Cracks running through samples of asteroid Ryugu were probably formed by the repeated thawing and freezing of water inside it, which could have helped asteroids like this carry the building blocks of life to early Earth

Astronomers have detected an exoplanet around Barnard’s star, one of the sun’s closest neighbours, but it is too hot for liquid water or life

Unravelling the complex biological process that allows fish to regrow injured fins could help advance regenerative medicine in humans

Fishers in Albania caught a blue shark with an 18-centimetre fragment of swordfish bill embedded in its skull, in the first known case of a shark surviving such an injury

Google, Microsoft and others have taken big steps towards error-free devices, hinting that quantum computers that solve real problems aren’t far away

Plankton that lived during the last glacial maximum have helped confirm the accuracy of our climate models – suggesting the predictions those models make about future El Niño events are accurate too

Coral reefs around the world are at risk of collapse due to rising temperatures and acidifying oceans, but the natural adaptability of some species may help buy time

Rapid erosion caused by a geological act of “piracy” tens of thousands of years ago may have raised Earth’s crust and elevated Mount Everest by as much as 50 metres

A beam of radioactive carbon ions has been used to destroy cancer cells in mice, demonstrating a therapy that may cause less collateral damage than current techniques

Mosquito larvae die after consuming hemp leaves because they react strongly to the cannabidiol in the foliage. The discovery might lead to the development of a new pesticide to control mosquito numbers

Our immune cells change a lot as the decades progress, which could explain why we become more susceptible to certain conditions

A US standards agency has issued new guidance saying organisations shouldn’t require users to change their passwords periodically – advice that is backed up by decades of research

Bacteria that have been genetically engineered to work like computers can solve a range of problems, using a very simple type of artificial intelligence

An AI-assisted analysis of satellite images suggests the vapour trails produced by aircraft have a net cooling effect in the daytime because they reflect sunlight back into space

Voice assistants can build profiles of their users’ habits and preferences, but the consistency and accuracy of these profiles vary

Astronomers listened for radio signals emanating from planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, but found no evidence of any interplanetary communications

Northern sea robins are formidable marine hunters, and they owe their success to modified fin rays that let them find prey buried in the seabed

It has become trivially easy to use artificial intelligence to edit images or generate video to remove unwanted objects or beautify scenes, but doing so leads to people misremembering what they have seen

Replacing some existing vegetable oil crops with camellia oil could boost production while reducing environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions

A distant planet should have been consumed when its star expanded to become a red giant, perhaps offering insights into planetary migration