Science News

Four tips in case you wanted to follow in the footsteps of the $50 million Brussels diamond theft and heist yourself some valuable jewels. Last night, an estimated $50 million worth of diamonds--both cut and uncut--were ...

The mass of the celebrated boson may actually mean we live in an unstable universe, but heavier partner particles offer a glimmer of hope

A cheap, portable device that reads your mind to gauge your concentration could some day ease information overload in stressful jobs like air-traffic control

Scans of fetal brains as they develop could shed light on the causes of schizophrenia and autism

Researchers are working to create math programs that watch kids' faces and adjust problem difficulty based on how users feel. If only Number Munchers had known when you were getting frustrated. A new pilot computer progr...

Last year, Google envisioned their augmented reality device as an in-your-face smartphone screen. But now they've created something much, much better. And you can get one. When Google released their original concept vide...

The brain has such fine control over the muscles used to speak that every sound produces different neural activity, a map of which may explain speech quirks

Some countries ban them, but British regulators are considering electronic cigarettes on prescription - we take a puff on the evidence (full text available to subscribers)

A planet just larger than the moon has become the smallest known world - but two others could depose it if their sizes are confirmed

Electrodes under the retinas of people blinded by disease - but who still have vision-processing neurons - allow them to see again

Recalling the passion of Renaissance astronomers for observing the heavens leads one artist to draw links with modern surveillance

The puma can be found from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes.

An overheated greenhouse, a faster spin, a giant sun, a game of planetary billiards: what explains how Earth got so warm so fast, asks Stuart Clark (full text available to subscribers)

It's hard to imagine a Star Trek away team without their tricorders waving back and forth, scanning for life forms. Was there anything those things couldn't do, and might we primitive 21st century humans develop a simila...

An appreciation of the rich inner lives of nonhuman animals dates back at least to Aristotle and gained support from Charles Darwin, who saw any differences between humans and other animals as a matter of degree, not kin...

I mean, a LOT like a Death Star. After the double-whammy of a meteorite hitting Russia and a near-miss with an asteroid, some scientists have been thinking over how to deal with space rocks. A team of California scientis...

Quantum computers sound exotic but their killer function could be solving mundane equations very, very fast

An automatic pedestrian-detection system can warn drivers when people are likely to step out onto the road, and cushion a collision. Volvo, the Swedish carmaker known for its safety engineering (a Volvo engineer invented...

It's not a good time to be a meat lover. As the horsemeat scandal spreads across Europe, a report blames livestock for farms' excessive fertiliser use

The new coronavirus that emerged in the Middle East last year could be pegged back by artificially boosting the body's immune response

As a Canadian near-Earth object spotter prepares for lift-off, funds are flooding in to help commercial firms launch their own asteroid hunters

Robot iCub uses an artificial neural network to understand new sentences. A robot with an artificial brain is learning languages--even heavily accented ones--by stringing together words and sentences. Peter Ford Dominey ...