Science News

Though still a concept, this robot lifeguard should be one robot people are grateful to see coming. Lifeguards of the future may soon come with four rotors. RTS Labs, an Iranian research firm, has started work on a drone...

The age of throw-away army drones is nearing - researchers have built a prototype of a super-cheap, light flier designed for single-use surveillance

As the whale migration season reaches its peak, new concerns arise over naval training exercises off the California coast.

When activated, the device sends "Help!" messages social media accounts and nearby aid workers. Activists and aid workers who document government abuses or monitor elections often risk abduction by those who oppose their...

PETMAN tries on some new duds. The robot-makers over at Boston Dynamics make some consistently amazing robots, and consistently amazing videos of said robots. Another of their 'bots, BigDog, took runner-up in our drones ...

A new analysis is revealing how ancient Greeks made hefty metal rams for their warships

A new method can visualize with 60 percent accuracy what you're seeing while you sleep. With just an fMRI, an algorithm, and the internet, researchers from Kyoto, Japan predicted with 60 percent accuracy what a person wa...

All the latest stories on newscientist.com, including: first Americans, smartphones keep baby milk safe, infinite maze in your living room, and more

Ever wondered why syrup forms long strands when you pour it? It's all down to how thick it is - but not for the reasons you might think

Despite mounting evidence that many dinosaurs were feathered, the director of Jurassic Park 4 appears set on keeping them leathery

The number of conversations you have with your smartphone is about to go way up, for better or worse. Nuance, the company whose speech recognition technology helped bring Apple's Siri to life, is now taking its technolog...

Controlling another living animal with just your brain. It's a little bit scary! In a world's first, a researcher was able to create a brain-to-brain interface with an animal of another species, and issue commands with o...

Thousands of birds have been slaughtered in Shanghai to try to contain a new H7N9 bird flu strain that may have a mutation helping it to infect mammals

Peregrine falcon nest cameras in San Francisco and San Jose have been giving citizens the unique chance to watch these animals up-close since 2005.

If you've ever wondered how boneless chicken parts end up that way, take a peek inside one of the 4,000 or so poultry processing plants in the U.S. Workers man massive assembly lines to scald, pluck, gut, slice, and wrap...

We thought we knew who first set foot in the Americas, but new evidence means the question of our last great migration is wide open again (full text available to subscribers)

Global warming bleaches and kills coral, but reefs can recover if their environment is pristine and free of human impacts such as pollution

Calculating air travel is a surprisingly tough math challenge. If you consider how many things have to go right for it to work, passenger flight is a seamless experience almost all of the time. Except when it isn't, and ...

Watch an animation of a white dwarf bending a larger star's light, illustrating one of the first examples of the effect spotted by NASA's Kepler space telescope

Earth looks safer thanks to a new model that suggests intense gamma-ray bursts stem from rare stellar collisions that can't happen in our galaxy

Partial zero, elephant sizing, quantum icing and more (full text available to subscribers)

C-3PO and the Borg inspired Illah Reza Nourbakhsh to imagine the reality of living with robots. The plausible scenarios of Robot Futures are the result