Science News

More than 3,000 people in Pakistan have been killed by drone strikes. Were they enemies? That's where it gets tricky. The United States has killed more than 3,000 people in Pakistan with drone strikes. Breaking down who ...

Combining 3D printing technology with the convenience and accessibility of the DVD-dispensing Redbox service, student entrepreneurs at UC Berkeley have built a vending machine with a seemingly infinite selection of produ...

Without global coverage, weather (and climate) prediction models will get things wrong. Pictures like the one above, showing Hurricane Sandy, are captured by satellites owned and operated by our federal government. But w...

All the latest stories on newscientist.com, including: dark matter's Goliath meets its David, robot surgeon's lawsuits, gene therapy cures leukaemia, and more

Robot surgery can mean less blood loss, smaller scars and quicker recovery time, but what if there are complications?

Giving top researchers huge prizes will never make them natural celebrities, but could make them great ambassadors for science, says writer Michael Brooks

A plot of over a million photos taken from the International Space Station reveal a map of the world as seen by 12 years' worth of space travellers

Gravity defines a black hole, but a model that ignores gravity and is based entirely on quantum mechanics has reproduced surprisingly similar features

How does an economically isolated pariah state make money? The black market, apparently. North Korea is a bizarre country. Ruled by a 26-year-old dictator, technically still at war with its southern neighbor, and respons...

With its computer glitch solved, the rover is staying busy until the sun gets in the way. The Mars rover Curiosity is back in action after solar radiation interrupted its mission a few weeks ago. It even swallowed some m...

Dark matter is the Goliath that supposedly dominates our galaxy. But it might already have met its David (full text available to subscribers)

Sometimes when words just aren't sufficient, adding an image can spark understanding and inspiration. Welcome to the National Science Foundation’s International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge 2012...

In the United States a disease is considered rare if fewer than 200,000 Americans have it. About 7,000 diseases meet this criterion, and the number of people affected by them: 25 million. Doesn’t sound so rare aft...

Drug cheats have been warned to stay away from a drug called GW501516 that rapidly causes cancers in rodents

Eight people in the US have been charged for illegally trafficking paddlefish and their eggs – which are sold on the black market as fake caviar

A mathematical look at the approximate expiration date for Google stuff. With Google's recent announcement that it would be discontinuing the cultishly beloved Google Reader, some people are understandably wary about oth...

A colorful mosaic of nano-scale grains on a super thin film

The US Treasury will insist that virtual currencies comply with anti-money-laundering laws just as Bitcoin hits a record high of $70

In The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the search for the impossible, Lance Fortnow finds deep implications for our future in an esoteric mathematical problem

Lab experiments with yeast suggest that multicellular tissues and specialised cells could have evolved when the costs of being bigger outweighed the benefits

Tweaking immune cells so they recognise a molecule found only on cancer cells can make a usually fatal form of leukaemia vanish

An international team of scientists that operate the BESIII Experiment at the Beijing Electron Positron Collider in China recently began a series of specialized studies aiming at an understanding of the anomalous "Y(4260...