04:13 08 January 2009

A balloon-borne experiment has turned up mysterious radio static that could come from the universe's first stars

21:08 07 January 2009  | 3 comments

A study of four distant quasars suggests that supermassive black holes may have matured long before the galaxies that surround them

19:54 07 January 2009

Hubble has found 14 stars that are shooting through interstellar gas, creating 'bow shocks' that resemble the waves at the bow of a boat

18:00 07 January 2009  | 29 comments

The Sun is about to go into a period of low sunspot activity and could let more harmful cosmic rays enter the solar system

17:20 07 January 2009  | 1 comment

Pulsars are not simply lighthouses that beam out radio waves from their poles - many also emit gamma rays from their equators

10:00 07 January 2009  | 5 comments

A time-lapse movie suggests the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A may be channelling its energy into creating high-speed cosmic rays

17:22 06 January 2009  | 24 comments

Dust with a similar composition to the Earth has been found swaddling six stars, suggesting rocky planets may be common

23:48 05 January 2009  | 45 comments

The sharpest infrared picture yet taken of the roiling furnace at the galaxy's centre reveals a new population of massive stars

11:46 05 January 2009  | 15 comments

Newts aren't normally fazed by having their tails chopped off – they just grow a new one – but microgravity plays havoc with the process

10:50 05 January 2009  | 18 comments

The next generation of particle smashers might be considerably smaller than the Large Hadron Collider – and made almost literally out of thin air

22:12 02 January 2009  | 40 comments

Circles of rocky material sorted by size suggest that the local Martian climate was once much warmer than thought

11:01 02 January 2009  | 6 comments

The most popular space stories of the year include a gallery of spooky cosmic images and an exploration of whether the universe existed before the big bang

23:03 01 January 2009  | 1 comment

Astronomers observed the most powerful explosion ever recorded, detected what may be dark matter and found hints of a fractal universe

18:57 31 December 2008  | 3 comments

Astronomers glimpsed unseen swathes of Mercury, found a space rock heading for Earth and landed a probe squarely on a patch of Martian ice

03:45 31 December 2008  | 25 comments

The shift from what appeared to be a normal descent on 1 Feb 2003 into disaster happened so fast that the crew didn't have time to close their visors

00:01 31 December 2008  | 3 comments

After a year in which the much-anticipated Large Hadron Collider has been delayed, you might think particle physicists don't have much to be jolly about – not so...

11:07 28 December 2008  | 6 comments

Explore the limits of science and technology from the past year, from the deepest living fish to the roundest spheres

01:00 28 December 2008

China performed its first spacewalk and India sent a probe to the Moon, while NASA faced the space shuttle's looming retirement

11:30 27 December 2008  | 75 comments

Barack Obama may have an impossible burden of expectation on his shoulders, but one fervent wish of many US scientists should be easy to fulfil: lead the nation back into the "reality-based community"

10:00 27 December 2008  | 18 comments

Will we ever see the like of MACHOs and WIMPs, cheap date and Sonic hedgehog again? New Scientist investigates

12:15 26 December 2008  | 1 comment

China carried out its first space walk, while India's launch of its first moon probe heralded a new era in space

08:00 26 December 2008  | 9 comments

From a nano-sized Barack Obama, to calls for a 'Gaian dictator' to save the world, the blogs have been buzzing this year – here we round up a few of our favourites

14:12 25 December 2008  | 6 comments

It's been a turbulent 50th anniversary year for the space agency, with its successes marred by uncertainty over the shuttle's replacement, problems with Hubble, and serious budget woes

14:09 24 December 2008  | 8 comments

The agency has awarded $3.5 billion in contracts to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences to ship cargo to and from the space station beginning in 2010

13:00 24 December 2008

It was a year when everything seemed to fall apart. Fuel, food, finance all had their crises &ndash but it wasn't all doom and gloom...

15:52 23 December 2008  | 1 comment

A new device will monitor electrical charges that may have caused Soyuz space capsules returning from the station to land off course

00:37 23 December 2008  | 9 comments

Forget spacesuits, solid rocket boosters and robot arms – more sentimental and whimsical objects have reached escape velocity

18:05 19 December 2008  | 86 comments

The digested end-product of this cosmic feast could be the ancestors of the supermassive black holes that sit at the centre of galaxies like the Milky Way

13:19 19 December 2008  | 90 comments

Physicists are surprised to find that military intelligence has been investigating whether elusive gravitational waves could pose a threat to US security

10:24 19 December 2008  | 2 comments

The Earth's protective magnetosphere often develops two large holes that let in the largest leaks of solar wind