Science News

Wiki Weapons Project conducted its first live test, and the partially printed AR-15 fell apart fast. A field test of a 3-D printed assault rifle ended quickly over the weekend, with the printed plastic parts breaking apa...

Really! "Earth As Art," a free e-book from NASA, shows off surreal photos of Earth with light taken outside the visible spectrum. Here are 19 of our favorites. It's already unlikely we'll get a view as good as the ones c...

Robots can lure "predator" machines to false locations, and feign strength to deceive enemies. Squirrels have a habit of storing acorns and other nuts in various spots, then patrolling those stashes. But what happens if ...

NASA's Voyager 1 has detected a zone where charged particles can race along magnetic field lines linking the solar system with interstellar space

A $2.1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the University of California at Berkeley, through the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP), will fund the development of revolutionary technol...

Thick plates protected this massive dinosaur from predators.

Here are the five steps to a successful banking-fraud heist. Robbing a bank sounds like hard work! It's not exactly the safest way to earn a living, and you have to get all dressed up for it. But if you take the electron...

A disembodied human face hangs atop a robot chassis next to a Redmond, Oregon hospital bed (not pictured). The doctor on the screen is 20 miles distant, in Bend. But from there he is able to assess the patient and determ...

The latest Call of Duty game continues the franchise’s dominance of the video game market. Activision reported that within the first 24 hours after Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 went on sale, a record breaking $500 mi...

Your yard is the new frontier as wildlife returns to the suburbs. In Nature Wars, Jim Sterba calls for a shift from conservation to culling to win back territory

This nanofabric dissolves in the body, releasing antivirals and blocking sperm. University of Washington researchers have developed a new contraceptive that for the first time offers women a discreet way to protect again...

Rejection and heartbreak can have effects every bit as physical as cuts and bruises, and understanding why could change your life (full text available to subscribers)

Attention, Pollock wannabes – watch different colours of paint interact to produce abstract images thanks to fluid dynamics

Texas has a reputation as the fossil fuel and climate change denial capital of the US, but George Marshall found that things are quietly changing

NASA's Curiosity rover has found an unusually high proportion of heavy hydrogen in the Martian soil that may help pin down how Mars lost its atmosphere

The NASA rover's first chemical analysis of Martian soil has revealed a carbon compound of uncertain origins