Science News

The tired legs of 80 jetlagged students shuffle to their seats of Mountain View California's Computer History Museum, in preparation for a summer that will change their lives and perhaps the world. "What unites all of yo...

Artist Minsu Kim introduces synthetic biology to contemporary gastronomy. If you go to the right restaurant, you can eat shrimp or octopus that's still alive and moving, but that's not to everyone's taste. Minsu Kim, a s...

What are police departments doing with all that data? In Northern California, law enforcement agencies are using license plate readers to build a giant database of publicly available personal information--all obtained le...

All the latest on newscientist.com: smart grids for the people's renewable power - and how it will eclipse gas by 2016 - traces in the brain, and more

The International Energy Agency projects that power from renewables will soon exceed that from gas, but some analysts say gas will be tough to phase out

An Interpol campaign has netted 9.9 million doses of counterfeit pharmaceuticals offered online, including fake antibiotics and cancer drugs

Three astronauts have thumped down after a fortnight in space - nothing special, but China's slow and steady approach may yet put it ahead in the space race

Fact-checking Edward Snowden's anti-spy technique Being legal counsel for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden probably comes with its fair share of paranoia. To combat eavesdropping techniques that can activate a cell phone...

The Goldstone boson, a particle from the 1960s, may be out there masquerading as a fraction of a neutrino. If so, it could tell us a lot about dark matter

Paying less for more: how energy-efficient LED bulbs outshine the competition while saving you money.

How Galileo showed we aren't at the center of the universe

Replacing a cumbersome metal arm with an inflatable limb will lighten up PackBot, iRobot's rugged anti-bomb robot, making it faster, safer and cheaper

If you live in Europe, expect to see plenty of tanukis in the next few decades - these east-Asian canids are spreading rapidly

Sterilisation measures for spacecraft are so restrictive that we are wasting too much money in our missions to the Red Planet, argues a pair of Mars scientists

A robot that homes in on odour sources could sniff out dangerous chemicals or pinpoint a fire

The campaign against Roche's controversial anti-flu drug is not based on the best available evidence

Echoes of intense mental work can be found a day later in the brain's activity patterns, raising the future possibility of mind-reading what you did yesterday

Even plants and animals like to leave a good impression.