A Purdue University committee says the scientist who claimed to have triggered 'bubble fusion' in 2002 is guilty of research misconduct

Several of us at New Scientist recently came across an interesting paper by Timothy Clifton and colleagues at the University of Oxford entitled "Living in a Void: Testing the Copernican Principle with distant supernovae".The paper argues that if we are...

If they had super-powerful telescopes, it might look like what the Deep Impact probe recently saw from its vantage point 50 million km away

The US plan to send humans back to the Moon is experiencing growing pains.Publicly, NASA has said it plans to launch Orion, an Apollo-like capsule that will replace the space shuttle and will also ferry astronauts to the Moon, by...

Ceres sits in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter – yet its composition suggests it has wandered far from its origins

The Mars lander has successfully drilled holes into the icy soil, a first step to delivering ice to the craft's science instruments

The highest-resolution spectrometry ever taken shows the planet's oldest terrain is rich in clay minerals, which formed in liquid water

Distant galaxies have magnetic fields apparently too strong to have formed by the dynamo mechanism thought to create them

The Milky Way's current record holder, Eta Carinae, has some competition in the Peony nebula star

Spacewalkers lay the groundwork for an extra berthing port at the space station for when the crew size doubles to six next year

The solar system's most dangerous rock, Apophis, could be more of a threat to Earth than thought

The large object 2005 FY9 is christened after an Easter Island deity – but naming the next 'plutoid' may be much more controversial

Astronomers have finished building a detector called ANTARES under the Mediterranean Sea – it will look through the Earth at the southern sky

Astronomers have found the remnants of a star close to Regulus, one of the brightest in the sky, which could explain its odd pumpkin shape

What will it take to persuade the moon to give up its secrets? Maybe a global space mission would do it, says Dana Mackenzie

The massive, rocky worlds – even those orbiting searingly close to their stars – may provide the right conditions for life

Similar bolts on Soyuz spacecraft are suspected of failing to fire during atmospheric re-entry, causing bumpy landings

Iran test-fired missiles for the second day in a row on Thursday – the US responded that it was ready to defend its allies

The planet's Great Red Spot and Red Spot Jr dismembered their little brother last week when it tried to come between them

Most asteroids with moonlets started off as solitary bodies that split in two while sunbathing, new computer simulations suggest

An analysis of volcanic glass collected during the Apollo missions reveals the Moon's interior may hold as much water as Earth's

Iran warns it could retaliate against military strikes over its disputed nuclear activities, but analysts say its capabilities are limited

While observing our own Milky Way, Hubble accidentally imaged star clusters in a distant galaxy that appear puzzlingly red

Experience the beauty of Saturn and its moons close-up with Carolyn Porco, head of the Cassini mission's imaging team

Returning Mars rocks to Earth could be our best hope of answering long-standing questions about Mars and whether the planet ever hosted life

What really happened in the first few minutes after the big bang? One element could hold the answer, says Matthew Chalmers

The supernovae that astronomers use to measure dark energy's affect on the universe's expansion have more complex origins than we thought

Discrete chunks rather than jets of plasma may be behind some of the universe's most powerful explosions

As early as the end of July 2008, NASA plans to test solar sail technology in orbit with a tiny spacecraft called NanoSail-D

The space shuttle may have to work past retirement age, after all.The US Congress is currently trying to set NASA's future mission and goals by drafting a bill called the NASA Authorization Act. A version of the bill, obtained by...

Data from the Messenger probe suggests Mercury has a molten core that is cooling and causing the whole planet to contract

An extremely rare alignment between Earth and a pair of dense stars called pulsars reveals how bodies wobble in the presence of gravity

Ever had a burning desire to hunt for black holes? See how well you score in this black hole hunter game, developed by researchers at Cardiff University, UK, as part of the 2008 Royal Society Summer Exhibition in London.In the...