Science News

The "Bloody Mary" illusion evokes strange sights in the mirror. Douglas Heaven braves an apparition that could help people with schizophrenia (full text available to subscribers)     

GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G, GPS: a smartphone already has to handle many wireless standards. And this number will only increase further. There are still no good filters to keep all those future standards separate. Research...

Image of German-designed e-bike via Wikimedia There's a new class of electric bicycles prompting oodles of attention, collecting millions of dollars in funding and providing little more than dust-collecting, spider web-e...

Hurricane Sandy's powerful storm tide flooded 70 percent of New Jersey's historic submerged marshes. Now, geologists are plumbing for past storm records.

A new documentary that investigates the impact of U.S. drone strikes premiered this week in New York City.

Columbia Engineering researchers have experimentally demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to electrically contact an atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) material only along its one-dimensional (1D) edge, ...

Humpback whales feed on fish just off the seafloor, making them vulnerable to entanglement in seafloor fishing gear.

Bartendro Camper English Revelers sipped into the future last weekend at BarBot 2013.75. The event, part of Bay Area Science Week, gathered the greatest in cocktail robotics in a basement event space in downtown San Fran...

Using lasers, scientists can now surgically blast holes thinner than a human hair in the heads of fruit flies, allowing them to gaze at how the rodents' brains worked while still alive.

Almost a kilometre down, the biggest ocean on Earth has warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than at any time since the last ice age     

The number of malaria cases in the United States is the highest in more than 40 years, according to a new report for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

From links between individual neurons to fibers that span vast neural regions, the human brain is a marvel of neural wiring. A series of articles published today (Oct. 31) in the journal Science explores what scientists ...

With their suite of sensors and built-in GPS, smartphones can work out when motorists are parking or about to leave a parking space, and let you know     

It may look wicked, but a stunning -- if not scary -- new view of the Witch Nebula unveiled by NASA for Halloween is actually the home of baby stars just beginning their cosmic lives. NASA featured the image as its space...

All the latest on newscientist.com: how to conjure ghosts, gene therapy back on track, get round internet censors, zap your brain to love art more, and more     

Did a giant Kraken troll the Triassic seas, crushing ichthyosaurs and arranging their bones into pleasing patterns?

Tail wagging could convey more meaning among dogs than previously thought. A new study found that dogs have different emotional responses to their peers depending on the direction of a tail-wag.

Beach nourishment works, according to a detailed survey of New Jersey homes damaged by Hurricane Sandy. But protecting private property by replenishing storm-damaged beaches may be tilting at windmills.

A controversial theory involving an ancient giant squid or octopus preying on ichthyosaurs gets new life, as researchers claim they've found part of the beak of the Triassic monster.

Boeing 737 Wikimedia Commons For too long, we have been held back by primitive, superstitious ideas about electronics on airplanes. No more! We are free! The FAA has announced that they will soon allow passengers to keep...

In this cool video, professor Abigail Marsh explains how multiple pathways can trigger a response to fear.

TRIPLE-NEGATIVE breast cancer is one of the nastiest there is. It is hard to treat and almost always fatal. One reason treatments tend to fail is that its cells are armed with molecular pumps which remove anti-cancer dru...