With sales skyrocketing, a shortage of this key critical material could halt progress

If an advanced civilisation lived on Earth millions of years ago, would we be able to tell?

While fertility rates in the developed world are falling, more and more of us are choosing to parent pooches

The oldest cheese samples that survive today were found in the necks of Bronze Age mummies in China

Is there life elsewhere in the Universe? If you look at the deep-field images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, it’s easy to believe there might be something. Those images capture a portion of the sky smaller than a grain of sand held at arm’s length, and yet, in them, you can see thousands of galaxies. Within each of the galaxies are billions of stars. In the face of those odds, it just feels implausible to think our little rock is the only one where life found a way. The more we study other-worldly materials, like meteorites from Mars and dust collected from asteroids, the more we find the type of ingredients needed for biological processes. The most compelling discovery of this kind came in January, when scientists declared they’d found 14 of the 20 amino acids that make up human proteins inside a sample returned from the asteroid Bennu. In fact, they found all five of the nucleotide bases that make up our DNA (adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil). So, what does it all mean? Could life be quite common in the cosmos? Did life on Earth come from another world? Jonathan O’Callaghan picks up the story in this issue.

Toxic tides are delivering the dangerous pollutant to animals and people at the top of the world

Nature’s fiercest phenomena are getting even more ferocious

Engineers at CERN are planning to store and transport antiprotons in a very-high vacuum enclosure

New research claims it's possible to get people's brains to communicate to one another in dreams

They leave their bodies, witness a bright light and return forever changed. But do survivors of near-death experiences truly glimpse into the great beyond? New research into the brain's final moments could decode these visions at life's edge.