SpaceX is going to the moon, and its competitors are complaining. On 16 April, NASA announced that it had selected Elon Musk’s space-flight company to build the lunar lander that will take humans to the moon’s surface as part of its Artemis programme. SpaceX beat out two rivals that hoped to secure the $2.9 billion contract – defence firm Dynetics and private space-flight company Blue Origin – both of which have now filed complaints with the US government alleging that the selection process was unfair. Experts in the space community had expected NASA to select two of the three finalists…

Venus has a core that is approximately 7000 kilometres in diameter – about the same size as Earth’s – according to the first observation-based estimate. Studying Venus is notoriously difficult owing to its thick atmosphere, which hides the surface. As such, radar and other specialist observation techniques are required to probe beneath its abundant clouds. Jean-Luc Margot at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues examined Venus from 2006 to 2020, using the Goldstone Solar System Radar in California to hit the planet with radio waves. They then used both this and the Green Bank Telescope some 3000…

House mice from cold environments (right) have evolved to become bigger than house mice from warm environments (left) in a few hundred years

Children could be set on a path to developing allergies, asthma and eczema before they are born. Analysis of a baby’s first stool, known as meconium, shows that a lack of certain biochemicals and gut bacteria normally seen in the faeces is linked with a higher risk of allergies and other conditions. Allergic conditions such as food allergies, hay fever, asthma and eczema are caused by the immune system overreacting to harmless compounds in the environment. Many studies have found links between such immune system reactivity and a lower diversity of gut bacteria, or microbiome. One idea is that a…

A survey shows a region of Saudi Arabia is home to 1000 monuments that may all date back 7000 years, and that seem to have been used for ritual activities

A bay in south-west Japan could become the place on Earth that geologists use to officially establish the start of the Anthropocene, thanks to an abundance of sardine scales and other evidence revealing humanity’s growing influence on the planet. Beppu Bay has now formally joined 10 other sites being considered by researchers trying to find the planet’s best candidate for a “golden spike”, a clear signal in Earth’s geological record that can designate a new epoch shaped by human impact. In 2016, scientists on the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) voted in favour of a defining new epoch starting around the…

A South American black widow spider starts biting, wrapping up and eating her willing partner before they have finished mating – and then mates with (and eats) another male. “Usually there are some advantages to the male for being eaten during mating, like longer copulations as well as decreased female receptivity to future males,” says Luciana Baruffaldi at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada. “In this case, though, we don’t yet know how the male benefits from sexual cannibalism.” Despite a reputation for eating their mates, female widow spiders don’t always engage in such behaviour. However, scientists have identified three…

Pumpkin toadlets are poisonous frogs with brilliant orange skin that are small enough to fit on a thumbnail – and researchers have uncovered a new species of these vibrant amphibians. Ivan Nunes at São Paulo State University in Brazil and his colleagues suspected a local toadlet species (Brachycephalus ephippium) was more than it appeared to be. Unusually widespread for a pumpkin toadlet, the species was found throughout the south-eastern coastline of Brazil. The team suspected that the wide-ranging frogs were actually multiple species with smaller ranges. Nunes and his team collected wild toadlets from the Project Dacnis preserve near São…

Immune cells programmed to attack tumours in a smarter way have shrunk brain and ovarian tumours in mice studies where unaltered immune cells failed. The technology could be used to treat cancers as well as degenerative brain disorders. “We have more control over what the cell does when it reaches the disease site,” says Kole Roybal at the University of California, San Francisco. “We can really program in very specific functions.” Our bodies naturally kill off many nascent cancers, but sometimes immune cells called T-cells don’t recognise cancerous cells. One way to treat cancers that manage to dodge the immune…

For the first time, researchers have created a frozen cloud of molecules that share the same quantum state, meaning it behaves as if it were a single molecule. The arrangement provides a blank slate for experiments that could yield new materials, such as room-temperature superconductors. Cheng Chin at the University of Chicago and his colleagues formed a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) from thousands of caesium molecules, using lasers to remove their energy and cool them to near absolute zero. BECs are often called the fifth state of matter, after solids, liquids, gases and plasmas, and their particles share the same quantum…