Science News

The storm smash-up that morphed Hurricane Sandy into a hybrid weather monster left a chemical trail that scientists have decoded with the help of crowdsourced water samples.

A mathematical analysis of the game reveals that it belongs to a class of fiendish computational problems. Playing it might one day help solve them     

How do the 241 million people who feed the Twitter stream arrive at an opinion about an issue or a current event? Very quickly, it turns out.

You may owe your life to the lowly sea sponge. Flourishing in extreme, deep-ocean environments hundreds of millions of years ago, sponges may have helped produce the oxygen requisite for the explosion of more complex lif...

Scientists never understood exactly how finely tuned elephants' hearing is, until researchers tried to see if the pachyderms could distinguish among the sounds made by different groups of humans.

Dancer Marie-Claude Pietragalla Courtesy Dassault Systemes Benoit Marini has spent years working with virtual-reality technology for the French company Dassault Systemes. As the director for the company's Experiental Lab...

With a gargantuan head flaunting the largest teeth of any predatory dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus rex embodies the ideal nightmarish horror. So, what was such a ferociously large animal doing with such tiny forelimbs that look...

This cool space wallpaper from the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory shows the remarkable super star cluster Westerlund 1. This exceptionally bright cluster lies in the southern constellation of Ara (The ...

The secret to successful trick-roping involves a steady hand, large lasso and lots and lots of practice ... or perhaps a robot cowboy and a whole lot of math, physicists revealed in March.

A young adult's personality may hold clues to his or her health later in life, so perhaps doctors should assess their patients' personalities during checkups, a new study says.

Crystals hit with infrared light could be the next generation of nanometer scale devices.

Weapons found among China's terra-cotta warriors were made by cells of craftspeople working with identical molds, new research suggests.

This rare type of rainbow has previously only been glimpsed on Earth - and could help solve a decades-old mystery about Venus's atmosphere     

Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, answers an age-old question. --

All the latest on newscientist.com: philosophers and big cosmic questions, what's on an astronaut's mind, missing Malaysian plane and more     

Imagine that you are in a meeting with coworkers or at a gathering of friends. You pull out your cell phone to show a presentation or a video on YouTube. But you don't use the tiny screen; your phone projects a bright, c...

For the first time, identical twin astronauts will be used to study health in space - and the projects include some of the hottest topics in biomedicine     

At least two bursts of technical data from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet were broadcast and could hold valuable clues, New Scientist has learned     

A recent luncheon in Washington, D.C., celebrated the legendary meteorologist Robert Simpson, one of the creators of the Saffir-Simpson Scale, which measures hurricane intensity.

One woman's uncommon ability to fight her HIV infection may provide new insights for developing a vaccine that triggers a special immune response against the viral disease, researchers said.

Little-seen diaries by NASA astronauts are telling glimpses of life in space, from the ridiculousness of urination to the sublime sense of solitude     

The scent of a dead rival seems to be exactly what male Pennsylvania grass spiders look for when they approach a potential mate