Science News

Albert Einstein is hands-down the most famous scientist who ever lived, and one of the most famous people in history. His contributions to physics sparked one of history's greatest scientific revolutions, and fundamental...

Santa Rides An MRAP In Kabul The reindeer are probably just chilling inside. U.S. Navy photo by Capt. Jane Campbell, via Wikimedia Commons It's not a tank, but its appearance still screams military, especially on a colle...

Today in Stuff You Have To Look Out For In The Future: drones falling on your head. Apparently, one crashed in Manhattan on Monday--almost right into a businessman, an ABC affiliate is reporting. The drone only weighed 3...

Stanford University students set out to revolutionize home design by entering a solar powered prefab house into the Department of Energy's biennial Solar Decathlon competition.

IN 1996 Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted a paper to Social Text, a leading scholarly journal of postmodernist cultural studies. The journal's peer reviewers, whose job it is to ensure that publis...

3, 2, 1.1, lift-off THE space age began as a competition. In the 1950s and 1960s America and the Soviet Union took rocketry from the age of the V2 to that of the Saturn V in a race first to build nuclear missiles, and th...

"THE love of money", St Paul memorably wrote to his protégé Timothy, "is the root of all evil." "All" may be putting it a bit strongly, but dozens of psychological studies have indeed shown that people primed to think ...

CLOUDS and aerosols have long been two of the more mysterious forces in the climate. They sometimes warm and sometimes cool the Earth. The net effect, it was thought, was that they offset part of the overall warming tren...

But the company, 23andMe, insists it has no plans to use it to help people choose sperm and egg donors     

Potential Logitech Gamepad evleaks When Apple released iOS7, its latest smartphone operating system, the company included a way for developers to create game controller add-ons for the phone. Controller add-ons have exis...

The Red Planet's past was shaped by supervolcanoes akin to the one that sculpted Yellowstone National Park     

All the latest on newscientist.com: US gun epidemic, hairy black hole, lack of folic acid echoes down generations, ex-Soviet carbon sump and more     

The ivory trade may be helping to fund terrorist groups like al-Shabaab. Now an $80 million initiative will scale up the fight against elephant poaching     

When the Soviet Union collapsed, great tracts of farmland were abandoned. The area has now become the biggest ever human-made carbon sink     

Facebook is developing deep learning software to understand what its users say and do online. Unless the company is considering major changes to its business plan, the company will use artificial intelligence to learn mo...

Ancient Remains This mummy was once Amenhotep III, King Tut's grandfather. Getty Images/Kenneth Garrett Earlier this year, scientists published a study of whole-body CT scans of 137 mummies: ancient Egyptians and Peruvia...

For over 30 years emergency room doctor Garen Wintemute has studied gun violence in the US. He explains how a lack of funding has made the problem intractable (full text available to subscribers)     

Satellites don't come crashing down – despite our interfering moon's best efforts – because the Earth's bulges help keep them stable     

A study in mice suggests that folic acid deficiency triggers developmental defects, not just in their offspring but also in the following generations     

A safe way of extracting stem cells from the brain using magnetic nanoparticles could one day be used to treat people with Parkinson's or multiple sclerosis     

A survey of particle theorists reveals mixed feelings about the Higgs boson, and renewed optimism that we are well on the way to a dark matter breakthrough     

A colourful keyboard projection system helps novices learn to play the piano without reading music