The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Moin Hussain's debut feature film Sky Peals sees a man discover his father may be from outer space. Part sci-fi, part family drama, part coming-of-age tale, it is odd and otherworldly

A nearby star that exploded some 3 million years ago could have removed all dust smaller than a millimetre from the outer solar system

The largest and most ambitious Martian drone yet could carry kilograms of scientific equipment over great distances and set itself down on the Red Planet unassisted

A small world in the outer solar system appears to have volcanic activity possibly spurred by liquid water

Averting an asteroid strike will need many of the same skills we must hone to tackle climate change and future pandemics

Data collected by the Zhurong rover and orbiting satellites suggests the existence of an ancient shoreline in the Utopia Planitia region of Mars

Dangerous radiation reaches Mars at levels we aren't exposed to on Earth, which makes the Red Planet a particularly dangerous place to be during pregnancy

From nuclear strikes to giant spikes, discover the systems in place to prevent a collision and test your decision-making to see if you could avoid a catastrophic impact

Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, giving us our only up-close look at the planet – but unusual space weather just before the craft arrived has given us a misleading idea about the planet’s magnetic field

You might have heard about plans to establish a self‑sustaining city on Mars. Here’s what life would really be like on the Red Planet

A Spot robot equipped with a blowtorch can locate weeds on farms and precisely heat them up to stop them growing, offering a possible alternative to herbicides

Combining two neural networks has helped researchers predict potentially disastrous collapses in complex systems, such as financial crashes or power blackouts

A robot can hold a squash, pumpkin or melon in one hand, while it is peeled by the other

Electromagnetic radiation leaking from the cable between your computer and monitor can be intercepted and decoded by AI to reveal what you are looking at

Between 2005 and 2021, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were more likely to make policy changes in the weeks after negative stories in the media

Many people enjoy the experience of using AIs like ChatGPT or voice assistants like Alexa to find out information, but it turns out doing so makes it less likely you will spot inaccurate information

Devices that let people with paralysis walk and talk are rapidly improving. Some see a future in which we alter memories and download skills – but major challenges remain

A robot mimics the clever fin-folding mechanism used by tuna fish, which increased the bot's turning velocity by almost 33 per cent

To address the problem of AIs generating inaccurate information, a team of ethicists says there should be legal obligations for companies to reduce the risk of errors, but there are doubts about whether it would work

A newly identified smartphone vulnerability can reveal the floor plans of where you are and what you are doing - and it is possible that companies or intelligence agencies are already making use of it

Plans to create an interactive AI model of the legendary code breaker Alan Turing are reckless and problematic, says Matthew Sparkes

AI companies hope that feeding ever more data to their models will continue to boost performance, eventually leading to human-level intelligence. Behind this hope is the "transformer", a key breakthrough in AI, but what happens if it fails to deliver?

AI tools could help eliminate human bias in forensic investigations, say UCL scientists, who are using eye-tracking technology to study decision-making in skeletal analysis and crime scene examinations

After their initial training phase, AI algorithms can’t update and learn from new data, meaning tech companies have to keep training new models from scratch

Researchers trained a polymer gel to play the computer game Pong by passing electric current through it and measuring the concentration of ions

Computers made from DNA have previously only been able to store information or perform computations on it – now a new device can do both

A cyberterrorism charge in Pakistan connected to riots in the UK illustrates how authorities are reaching across borders to tackle disinformation, but bringing overseas suspects to justice won't always be possible

It can be difficult to spot AI generated videos known as deepfakes, but there are ways to spot one if you know what to look for

Google has built a quantum computer that makes fewer errors as it is scaled up, and this may pave the way for machines that could solve useful real-world problems for the first time

As misinformation about the upcoming US elections rockets across social media, creating chaos, companies need to be honest about where this content is coming from, says Annalee Newitz

Are humanoid robots the future of space exploration? New Scientist reporter James Woodford took NASA's Valkyrie for a spin to find out

NASA’s Valkyrie is undergoing tests to understand what it would take to get a humanoid robot onto offshore facilities or into space. New Scientist's James Woodford took the controls to see what it is capable of

Supremacy, a new book from tech journalist Parmy Olson, takes us inside the rise of machine learning and AI, and examines the people behind it

Experiments show that viewers can usually identify video deepfakes of famous politicians – but fake audio and text are harder to detect

Cyborg: A documentary tells the intriguing story of Neil Harbisson, who wears an antenna to “hear” colour, but it is lacking in depth and should have probed its subject more, says Simon Ings

Archaeologists are using AI and US spy satellite imagery from the cold war to find ancient underground aqueducts that helped humans survive in the desert

An artificial intelligence model that can identify the calls of eight whale species is helping researchers track the elusive whale behind a perplexing sound in the Pacific

A quantum computing protocol makes it possible to extract energy from seemingly empty space, teleport it to a new location, then store it for later use

We're trying to avert Judgment Day yet again – this time in an anime series for Netflix. But striking visuals can't make up for shortcomings in narrative and character development

CAPTCHA tests are supposed to distinguish humans from bots, but an AI system mastered the problem after training on thousands of images of road scenes

Using more training data and computational power is meant to make AIs more reliable, but tests suggest large language models actually get less reliable as they grow

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

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

What if tech bros ruled the world, asks Asif Kapadia's 2073. This docudrama is captivating and disturbing, but lacks enough heft to stand out

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

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

If artificial intelligence chatbots are fine-tuned to improve their responses using human feedback, they can become more likely to give deceptive answers that seem right but aren’t

Google DeepMind claims its AlphaChip AI method can deliver “superhuman” chip designs that are already used in its data centres – but independent experts say public proof is lacking

Smartphones have indeed created an "anxious generation", but it isn't young people, it is their parents, argues neuroscientist Dean Burnett