newscientist.com

By mulling over colliding bubbles on a cosmological scale, physicists are finding cause for speculation about fresh sparks of cosmic creation. It is possible, they say, that in the weeks after the big bang there was a second, similarly profound moment of transformation. This one may have spawned monstrous shadow particles...

Astronomers have spotted the earliest barred spiral galaxy yet. It is the same type of galaxy as our Milky Way, but it dates back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, earlier than was thought possible....

The asteroid Dinkinesh’s newfound moon is actually a contact binary – two objects lightly touching at their ends. This is the first time such a binary has been found orbiting another asteroid....

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 can identify a person’s age, location, gender and income with up to 85 per cent accuracy simply by analysing their posts on social media....

Gene expression patterns in starfish reveal a surprising answer to the question of how they evolved their unusual body shape

An annular solar eclipse, also known as a “ring of fire” eclipse because of the way the sun and moon line up, will be visible in the US, Central America and South America on 14 October...

cross-posted from: kbin.social/m/scifi/t/506685...

From an authorised sequel to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to a collection of newly discovered short stories from the late Terry Pratchett, there is a mountain of brilliant science fiction to get through this month

Three comets named Hartley, Encke and Tsuchinshan will pass by the sun in the next few months and be visible from Earth. Here’s how you can spot them

From 2001: A Space Odyssey to WALL-E, Erika Nesvold picks her favourite sci-fi films set in space (and explains why E.T. missed out)

India has launched its Chandrayaan-3 mission, which aims to explore the south pole of the moon by rover, completing a scientific mission that was first attempted in 2019 but ended in catastrophic failure due to a software glitch...

Thanks to gene therapy, people who could previously only detect shades of grey can now distinguish red objects from a darker background

Jaguar attacks on pets and farm animals are a common problem, but after developing a drug-induced stomach ache, the big cats seem to learn not to kill certain animals

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