Science News

Nerds and frat boys: brothers in beer drops. This August, drones will drop payloads all over South Africa's OppiKoppi music festival, and there's a good chance no one will mind. Probably because the payload is beer. Cust...

Ultra-secure quantum communications, used by banks and governments, are at risk from attacks by hackers who can clone intercepted photons

Lighter than an SUV and covered with more than 12,000 solar cells, Solar Impulse, the world's first solar plane that can fly day and night without recharging, launched from Moffet Field this morning in a cross country vo...

With cellphones for brains, a set of floating robots could soon be zipping around the International Space Station, helping astronauts with menial tasks

All the latest stories on newscientist.com: living without smell or flavour, mental health "bible" denounced, slacktivism, black hole binge, and more

The new edition of the DSM "bible" is so flawed that the US National Institute of Mental Health is right to abandon it, says a leading light of psychiatry

Cloud of gas swirling towards the black hole at the centre of our galaxy might allow us to test Einstein's greatest theory in a new way

A pack of killer whales with an ambitious appetite takes on a pod of sperm whales in an ocean-boiling battle, observed for the first time in the Indian Ocean

The US National Institute of Mental Health has slammed the validity of DSM-5 saying "patients with mental disorders deserve better"

The European Space Agency's Planck mission has generated a map of the infant universe that refines our understanding of what it's all made of and has upped its age by 100 million years.

Taste and smell disorders can be devastating, but often such problems get no treatment. Carl Philpott aims to change that (full text available to subscribers)

A record-breaking roller coaster that mimics the thrill of stunt flying. In the competitive world of roller-coaster design, engineers often obsess about smashing records and pushing the limits of human endurance. But rec...

Look to the iris. Iris scanning as a form of biometric recognition doesn't get as much attention as retinal scanning or fingerprints, but it's got a lot of advantages. Irises don't change over time, like fingerprints can...

Climate change may mean all painted turtles are born female, driving them to extinction

Cycling T&Cs, wine ageing magnets, wheatgrss juice, and more (full text available to subscribers)

Clicking on online petitions and "liking" Facebook statuses to show your support for a cause might not be that helpful

It took humans hundreds of thousands of years to invent the wheel, but molluscs have been turning out flawless spheres for hundreds of millions of years.