Science News

All the latest on newscientist.com: giant frozen methane bonanza, neuromyths in education, the Ehrlich-Simon bet, tanning whales, Martian soup and more     

Harvest Automation has built a robot to do something not especially difficult or sexy: move potted plants around in nurseries and greenhouses. It's a task the company decided to tackle with its first robot, dubbed Harvey...

A relative of the killer chytrid fungus that has devastated frog populations is sweeping through salamanders undetected     

Soot particles from increased rail transport and the booming tourist industry caused an extra metre of ice to melt each year in the mid-19th century     

With an erupting volcano continually messing up their island, the inhabitants of Montserrat have found a way to take aerial photography into their own hands     

The race is on to tap the world's biggest and most unusual fossil fuel supply - methane trapped in frozen hydrates in permafrost and at the bottom of the ocean (full text available to subscribers)     

-- Tracking the Disappearance of Ghostlike Neutrinos -- Scientists take step closer to finding cosmic ray's origins -- UCSC's Steve Ritz moves on from NASA Fermi Telescope project -- Daphne Bramham: TRIUMF director heads...

Paul Sabin reveals the huge repercussions of a wager in The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and our gamble over Earth's future     

As a new moon orbiter gets set to launch, Pete Worden, director of NASA Ames, says forget the 20th - this is the real space century