Science News

A lightning bolt is four times hotter than the sun's surface, yet we don't what triggers it. Alexandr Gurevich thinks the culprit is cosmic rays (full text available to subscribers)

A new system of evidence-based punishment for drugs crimes is paying dividends in a country plagued by overpopulated prisons

A spy plane, an intelligence agency, and the magical logic of conspiracy theories all made an American legend. Yesterday the CIA declassified a 400-page document about Area 51, the secret facility in the Nevada desert th...

The words robot and drone may conjure up images of a sleek, austere future, but some of the most compelling use cases for the machines involve situations that are too dangerous, or just plain messy, for a human to handle...

A new algorithm can spot fake photos by looking for inconsistent shadows that are not always obvious to the naked eye. Nina Matthews Photography via Flickr, rights info The technique, which will be published in the journ...

Great for tiny robots! GPS is really good at finding where people are, typically with a margin of error of just a few meters. That's fine if you're using GPS for driving directions, but if you're, say, a drone operator, ...

At a 5000-year-old burial site in Turkey, archaeologists have found 49 small sculpted pieces that could belong to some of the earliest known board games

A chance encounter with a mid-sized black hole probably sent two white dwarfs flying from their birth cluster and leaving the Milky Way

And fraud. And lying to auditors. And obstruction of justice. Boy did this guy screw up. The U.S. invasion of Iraq combined with the American-led war in Afghanistan provided a great profit opportunity for the body armor ...

World War II combat pilots have been lost at the bottom of the Pacific ocean for nearly 70 years. Now autonomous robots have been deployed to find them.

A radar-based system detects when large animals are near a road and uses flashing street signs to warn drivers

Hey you. Click this. There are some dudes walking around in space right now. Live streaming video by Ustream Right now, Alexander Mizurkin and Fyodor Yurchikhin, two Russian cosmonauts, as they call themselves (pretty co...

LONDON – Power-generating stations worldwide release 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year as they burn coal, oil or natural gas; home and commercial heating plants release another 11... --

In 2011, an earthquake destroyed the cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand. Its new replacement has 98 giant cardboard tubes to withstand future quakes

Stimulating the vagus nerve using bolts of electricity might be able to help with headaches, tinnitus and even Alzheimer's disease

A booming solar industry could use a robotic helping hand if it's to compete with fossil fuels as a global energy provider

Pillars at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey seem to align with the rising of Sirius, hinting that the bright star may have triggered a frenzy of religious construction

Too stupid to post, ever-enlarging cats, small print for eye tests and more (full text available to subscribers)

Mining social media to see where people go can give vital extra information to a business about the most lucrative spot for a new store

Over at Forbes, Andy Greenberg has penned a fascinating profile of Alex Karp, the CEO of the CIA-funded data mining company Palantir. Palantir applies Silicon Valley data-gathering expertise to the tremendous amount of s...

But unprocessed data from the Kepler telescope may yet yield more surprises, and there's a good chance the hobbled spacecraft will be repurposed