Microbot explorers

Of the hundreds of thousands of asteroids in our solar system, it is all too feasible that one could strike Earth. If scientists discover this is likely to happen, what are our options for defending ourselves – and who will make the key decisions? Tomas Weber reports

Isn’t it amazing that astronomy – humanity’s oldest science – continues to generate such a delightful amount of new knowledge? Seeing as we’ve been studying the motion of the stars for a good long whi

Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland recently taught the one-armed, four-legged ANYmal search and rescue robot to play badminton against a human. Fans of the sport may be relieved to learn that AN

I found your recent article Are We Aliens? (June, p62) very interesting. I noticed it mentioned that samples from the Mars Sample Return mission would “give us further clues” about the panspermia theo

Lighten your load with these mini marvels

‘The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space,’ wrote the American astronomer and author Carl Sagan in his book, Contact. Ever since humans first huddled