Science News

Optimists see the new resource as a cheap, clean "bridging fuel" to a low-carbon future. The true picture might not be so simple, says Michael Brooks (full text available to subscribers)

During the early days of the Atomic Age, it seemed like a healthy dose of nuclear power could make everything better. From 1945 until the late sixties, a bold new world powered by the unlimited cheap energy of the atom ...

See what getting knocked into last place looks like in data form. To show off the capabilities of number-crunching tool Manta, programmer Dave Pacheco explains how he wired a system for recording matches from the Nintend...

Time-lapse microscopy has captured severed DNA strands linking up with partners from the wrong chromosome, a process implicated in cancer

The most accurate timekeepers in the world just got a new use - as simulators of the complex quantum mechanics of electrons in a solid

Well, some day Inspecting nuclear weapons sites, while an important part of international treaties limiting a nation's number of warheads, can be expensive and tricky, depending on the availability of trained inspectors,...

All the latest on newscientist.com: robot appreciates another point of view, future fracking, your own private internet, and more

Electrical signals produced when a yellow slime mould moves eagerly towards food or is repulsed by light are used to power a human-like robot face

The first detailed observations of swimming chimpanzees and orang-utans show they take to the water in the same way humans do

We have created a completely new form of intelligence, though no human can fathom how it thinks and reasons. By Douglas Heaven (full text available to subscribers)

Over the last year, the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset, has flown from duct-taped prototype to massively anticipated gaming system. The firm has raised $2.4 million in a Kickstarter, oversubscribed ten to one, an...

Agricultural runoff is the leading cause of recurring algal blooms in Lake Erie. Now farmers are inviting researchers onto their fields to figure out why -- and what they can do about it.

A close-up of a promising material you may find in future electronics

The drums! The drums! Humans aren't the only animals that send long-distance messages via percussion - termites do the same to warn of approaching aardvarks