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Nasa has named the first woman and the first African American ever assigned as astronauts to a lunar mission, introducing them as part of the four-member team chosen to fly as early as next year on what would be the first crewed voyage around the moon in more than 50 years.

Christina Koch, an engineer who already holds the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman, was named as a mission specialist, along with Victor Glover, a US Navy aviator, who was selected as the Artemis II pilot.

Glover, who was part of the second crewed flight of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, would become the first astronaut of colour ever to be sent on a lunar mission.

Rounding out the four-member crew are Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian ever chosen for a flight to the moon, serving as a mission specialist, and Reid Wiseman, an International Space Station veteran, named as Artemis II mission commander.

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It's prime time to see the comet known as C/2022 E3, marked by its bright green nucleus and long faint ion tail. The comet has been visible for some time with telescopes and binoculars — but the best chance of seeing it with the naked eye is coming up on Wednesday, Feb. 1.

This marks possibly the first time ever — or at least for thousands of years — that the comet has streaked across our sky.

"If C/2022 E3 has ever passed through the solar system before, it would have last been seen in the sky more than 10,000 years ago," Jon Giorgini, a senior analyst at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told NPR.

Astronomers first spotted the brightening outburst in March 2022 at the Zwicky Transient Facility on Palomar Mountain in California. At the time, the comet was inside the orbit of Jupiter.

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Scientists have been given an unprecedented glimpse into the birth of stars and the early stages of the universe, after a new image showing a cluster more than 10bn years ago was released by the James Webb space telescope.

The image shows a young cluster of stars, known as NGC 346, which is more than 200,000 light years from Earth.

Scientists have taken a particular interest in the cluster, which is in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), because it resembles the conditions of the early universe when star formation was at its peak.

Astronomers hope that studying the region could give more answers as to how the first stars formed during the “cosmic noon”, only 2 or 3 billion years after the big bang.

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An iron-rich planet spotted in a nearby solar system could help scientists understand the mystery of how the planet Mercury formed in our own neighborhood.

The newly-described planet is about 31 light years away, according to a report in the journal Science. Astronomers haven't seen it directly, but they've been able to estimate its size and mass by watching its effects on the star that it orbits. It appears that this planet is largely made of iron.

"From our measurements, we find that this exoplanet is smaller and less massive than the Earth," says Kristine Lam, a researcher at the Institute of Planetary Research in the German Aerospace Center in Berlin. "It could be similar to Mercury, which is composed of mostly iron."

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There’s never such thing as a shoo-in at the Nobel Prizes. The scientists who developed the various Covid-19 vaccines saving lives around the world may have been thought to be the frontrunners for this year’s Nobel in physiology and medicine.

Instead, the prize went to a pair of scientists who discovered something even more fundamental: why we feel the light prick of the vaccine needle and other kinds of touch, and why we feel painful heat and cold.

The Nobel Committee today (Oct. 4) named the US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian as the joint winners of this years prize. In 1997, Julius, a physiologist at the University of California San Francisco, tweaked cells to be responsive to capsaicin, the active chemical in chili peppers. By watching how these cells reacted to capsaicin, Julius found a sensor in nerves that signaled sensations of “pain” and “heat” when the skin encounters high temperatures.

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North Atlantic right whales now grow smaller than they did 40 years ago, and new research suggests a leading cause is the damage human activity inflicts on the critically endangered mammals.

The findings, published today in the journal Current Biology, reveal that when fully grown, a North Atlantic right whale born today would be expected to be about one meter shorter than a whale born in 1980. Currently, full-grown members of the species average 13 to 14 meters in length (43 to 46 feet).

"The first inkling that we had came from the folks who were collecting the data in the field, where, as the story goes, they saw what looked to be a really young whale, a calf, or maybe one- or two-year-old," said Joshua Stewart, a postdoctoral researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Marine Mammal and Turtle Division and lead author of the new study. "But it turns out that they were actually 5-year-old or 10-year-old whales that were smaller than a typical 2-year-old."

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