Science News

A new interactive website shows a phylogenetic tree of everything, as zoomable as Google Earth. From protozoans to people, there is a lot of life on this planet, and it’s all connected to a common ancestor from wh...

A plastic wrapper dropped by Curiosity has prompted the rover team to take a closer look at mysterious bright bits in the surrounding soil

The robotic wheelchair senses the topography of a surface and decides whether to roll across it, or walk. Wheels are the most efficient way to get around, but they can't take you everywhere. This new robotic wheelchair d...

The first commercially available amphibious vehicle capable of decent speeds--45 miles per hour on both land and water--is expected to go on sale in the U.S. by the end of this year. At $40,000 a pop, the Quadski is an e...

All today's stories on newscientist.com, inlcuding: Ada Lovelace, promising new cancer treatments, shocking underpants, and more

Tal Avitzur may be a math professor, but one look at his workshop reveals his other passion: scrap metal robots. For the last few years, he’s been finding other’s people junk and turning them into robot-...

The dinosaur with the fearsome face was a gentle giant.

The University of Tokyo’s latest robot suit can help humans lift heavy loads using naught but air. How exactly? Instead of complex, heavy electronic actuators, the suit uses simpler pneumatic artificial musc...

This might look like a pretty lily pad but it is actually a wafer created with lasers to mimic the iridescent colours of a butterfly's wings

The ability to make anything you like in a 3D printer could be constrained by a method for checking whether you're using protected intellectual property

PH1 orbits a pair of stars that are in turn orbited by a binary system, giving the exoplanet two more suns than Tatooine in Star Wars

A study in macaques has identified a set of neurons that fire only when the monkey makes eye contact with another macaque

We hope you've fully digested your lunch. Here is the latest video Red Bull has released of Felix Baumgartner's supersonic free fall on Sunday

A new exhibition explores the overlap between information visualisation and art – but the results are sometimes frustratingly vague

A host of experimental therapies are emerging that could dramatically improve our chances of curing cancer, say Shaoni Bhattacharya and Clare Wilson (full text available to subscribers)

Using the European X-ray astronomy satellite XMM-Newton(1), researchers from CNRS(2) and CEA (3) have discovered a new source of cosmic rays. In the vicinity of the remarkable Arches cluster, near the center of the Milky...

The author of the first computer program talks, via her letters, about her colleague Charles Babbage, the Analytical Engine and what the future holds