Science News

Into each life, some fall must reign.

22,300 miles above the equator, satellites keep an eye on Earthly weather conditions. Weather satellites above Earth stay in perfect, geosynchronized orbit, so you can probably guess at which one is keeping an eye out fo...

Researchers are gearing up to monitor the flood-causing weather monsters known as atmospheric rivers.

Two doubly quantum experiments serve as a rare experimental example of just how strange the quantum world is

Like headlights piercing the gloom, the bright cores of distant active galaxies have helped us glimpse how the first stars formed

All today's stories on newscientist.com, including: US military goes for green energy, robots taking over farm work, elephant speaks Korean, and more

A program dedicated to exploring the role of unmanned systems in news gathering issues its first report from the field. Over at the University of Nebraska, journalism students putting another tool in the reporter’...

Deployed off the coast of New Jersey earlier this week, the modified Wave Glider robot gathered realtime data from Sandy as the storm approached landfall Monday. Back in August, as Tropical Storm Isaac was churning towar...

Watch an elephant mimic human speech by putting its trunk in its mouth

A new operating system could protect power plants and other infrastructure from attack, but the approach may have its own loopholes

Control Data Corp’s (CDC) first supercomputer, the CDC 6600, operated at a speed of three megaflops (106 floating-point operations per second).  A half century on, our most powerful supercomputers are a billion...

Scientists and world leaders have long sought to tap the tidal power of our world’s oceans. Now an offshore turbine has begun turning near the coast of Maine, making it the first state in the US to harness the pow...

How a cordless drill replaces an entire workbench’s worth of gear. For everyday jobs, a do-it-yourselfer needs—at minimum—a drill, saw, and sander. Black & Decker engineers have created a tool, the M...

The apocalypse edition: Featuring a tiny hand-turbine that's good in a pinch, a jacket for firestorms or nuclear winter, and a stove that can burn almost any fuel. Will the world end on December 21, 2012? Probably not. B...

The Pentagon's plans to meet 25 per cent of its energy demands from renewables by 2025 could send benefits rippling throughout society (full text available to subscribers)

In his new book, Angst, Jeffrey Kahn argues that anxiety and depression have evolutionary benefits PLUS: Maverick mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot's memoir

A smartphone app will let you access tailored medical services on the fly without your genome falling into the wrong hands

A timeline for habitability on rocky planets around sun-like stars offers a glimpse of Earth's future and a way to search for alien life in places we might have overlooked