Space is big. Why not kick back, relax, and wait for them to come to you?

Inspired by hibernating squirrels, scientists have developed a promising new drug that could transform how we treat heart failure

We’re on the verge of decoding animal communication. Here’s what we’ve learned so far – and how AI could finally help us decipher their languages

Science has shown that having a raison d’être is good for us

I wonder how many discoveries in human history were made because someone thought: Let’s take a look around the corner? This time, the corner – figuratively speaking – is the region of space just beyond Pluto. More precisely, the area where the Sun’s influence begins to fade – the boundary of the heliosphere. Think of the heliosphere as a vast bubble, emanating from the Sun, that envelops our Solar System. Solar wind blasts out from the Sun in all directions, but eventually, it fizzles out the further away it gets. Where the winds are strong, they push back more harmful cosmic radiation gusting in from elsewhere in our Galaxy, shielding us. But the further these winds travel, the weaker they become, until, eventually, the solar particles become inconsequential. This is the place that scientists consider to be the edge of our Solar System and the beginning of the interstellar medium. Here, space roils with a cosmic zoo of exotic particles from strange places. This is exactly what NASA’s recently launched Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) wants to study. Its mission is to make sense of the stuff that’s arriving here from other parts of space, to understand how our Sun forms a barrier that protects us from the more harmful elements out there, and to chart what’s going on at the very edge of what we know. Get the full story in the November issue.

Most of us look forward to the extra hour we get in bed every October, but researchers argue that changing the clocks twice a year harms our health.

‘Liquid neural networks’ promise smaller, smarter and more transparent AI – and they’re already running on devices from drones to self-driving cars

Could all of this have happened before? And might it happen again?

Killer whales have a grisly new technique for hunting juvenile great white sharks – and scientists caught it on camera