Science News

How do you ban the coupling of a digital file and a legal technology? California State Senator Leland Yee (who represents the western part of San Francisco) announced that he will pursue outlawing 3-D-printed weaponry, i...

Existing wiretap law is almost 20 years old and doesn't capture the nuances of modern internet use. Here's how the FBI plans to get around it. A new FBI proposal would compel internet communications companies to hand ove...

Lessons from a "sugar daddy" dating website That widowed Ukrainian engineer you just met on your favorite dating website? She's probably a scammer. Scam dating profiles are more likely to say they are Catholic; from Nige...

The latest finds from robot explorers are boosting fears that fine-grained toxins in Martian dust will be hazardous to human explorers - and tough to avoid

Verdict: "Some very questionable flavor profiles" Two of the nation's finest chefs were invited to NASA's Space Food Systems Laboratory by Tested.com to sample the meals served on the International Space Station. Apparen...

More than a million Facebook accounts could be vulnerable to attackers using a simple method of email hijacking, researchers say

The World Wildlife Fund wants to thwart international crime with robots. Here is a complicated problem: Endangered elephants live in isolated nature preserves under the watch of woefully underfunded governments. Poachers...

Geneva, 8 May 2013. An international team at the ISOLDE radioactive-beam facility at CERN* has shown that some atomic nuclei can assume asymmetric, "pear" shapes. The observations contradict some existing nuclear theorie...

Curiosity is back after a month of radio silence, and the rover has been upgraded with software that gives it more autonomy while exploring Mars

The Middle Eastern coronavirus has started behaving disturbingly like SARS - making the search for undiagnosed cases increasingly vital

The decision of the leading US mental health institute to move away from the psychiatrists' "bible" means years of transition to biologically based diagnoses (full text available to subscribers)

All the latest stories on newscientist.com: Star Trek's medical tricorder gets real; goodbye, DSM - hello, biology; animal sex wars; and more

New flu tests have been given emergency approval, as it emerges that H7N9 provokes a weaker immune response than other flu, making vaccines hard to produce

The greater wax moth can hear ultrasonic noises that no known animal can pick up

A welding helmet to make metalwork safer. Within his first 30 minutes on the job at an aluminum factory in 1999, metalworker Michael Buckman inhaled so many noxious fumes he was sick with bronchitis for three days. As he...

A tiny biomimetic robot, dubbed RoboBee, recently took wing under controlled flight for the first time. The robot is part of Harvard's "Micro Air Vehicles" program led by principal investigator Robert Wood, and the contr...

The first trailer for Ender's Game, the sci-fi film based on the classic novel by Orson Scott Card, was released yesterday and it promises to be one of the biggest sci-fi movies of 2013. The Hugo award-winning story, whi...

Is a foolproof, smartphone-sized device that diagnoses diseases a pipe dream - or can a $10 million competition turn the fiction into a lifesaver? (full text available to subscribers)

Astronomers are asking volunteers to help them search for "space warps." More commonly known as "gravitational lenses," these are rare systems with very massive galaxies or clusters of galaxies that bend light around the...

Scientists from 26 institutions around the world are planning a new experiment that could open the doors to new realms of particle physics. But first, they have to bring the core of this experiment, a complex electromagn...

Tiny metal crystals have been glimpsed taking themselves apart to squeeze through tight spots in nanotubes, without melting or compressing

Daphne Fairbairn's vivid, insightful Odd Couples: Extraordinary differences between the sexes in the animal kingdom will leave you pleased to be human