Science News

In a world of satellite tracking and GPS, how do you lose a plane - and could spy satellites have seen what others didn't?     

AS JOHN IOANNIDIS prepares to launch an institute intended, among other things, to combat small, statistically underpowered scientific studies (see article), just such a study has hit the headlines. The media reaction to...

Talking cures for phobias or addictions take ages to detrain your brain. What if a memory-boosting drug let you do it in a day? Jessica Hamzelou pops the pill     

The way we secure digital transactions could soon change. An international team has demonstrated a form of quantum cryptography that can protect people doing business with others they may not know or trust -- a situation...

The longer it takes, the harder it gets to find the lost Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

(Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft) A nuclear waste repository must seal in radioactive waste safely for one million years. Researchers currently have to study them and their processes in real underground laboratories but a virtua...

Creatine is a performance-enhancing supplement used by athletes and other people, often in the hope of building muscle. But does creatine work? And is it safe to take? Here's a look at what science has to say about takin...

The best place to feel an earthquake is in bed, according to a study of Italy's crowdsourced earthquake reports.

A 13th-century Latin text has yielded a mathematical model of the universe that anticipates problems with our best understanding of the big bang     

Architects are attempting to 3D-print an entire house in Amsterdam. Now you can buy a ticket to watch the construction and help fund the project     

Physicists from the FOM workgroup Physics of Fluids (MESA+) at the University of Twente and from Océ-Technologies have developed a method to measure detailed speed data in flying inkjet drops. Their research was recentl...

As technologies such as mitochondrial transfer and fetal genetic testing become reality, society needs to come up with an ethical framework for evaluating them, one researcher argues.

A pygmy cousin of T. rex has been found on the North Slope of Alaska, where it once lived within the Arctic circle. The dinosaur's small body size may have been an adaption to its seasonal environment.

Big Data has amazing potential for public health and social sciences, but Google's attempts to track the flu via online search terms have met with some challenges. These problems highlight the pitfalls of Big Data for so...

A Colorful Saint Patrick's Day project from Science Buddies --

The search giant's much-hyped flu tracker has been way out on its predictions for years – raising concerns over our reliance on big data     

The winter storms that lashed England with record floods in February were among an unusually high number of hurricane-force storms in the North Atlantic this winter, according to NOAA's Ocean Prediction Center.

The oldest fossil evidence for babysitting now comes from 450 million-year-old rocks in New York.

The new director of the National Science Foundation, France Cordova, is the first astrophysicist and second woman to be confirmed as head of the federal agency.

All the latest on newscientist.com: therapy pill to detrain your brain, Colorado river to return from the dead, Formula 1 goes green, OCD and more     

The Indian summer monsoon abruptly weakened 4200 years ago, and this may have led to the collapse of the elaborate Indus Valley Civilization     

Greetings, podcast listeners! This week's Physics Central Podcast is a short story I heard about at the APS March Meeting that just wrapped up in Denver, Colorado. A physicist at Cornell University is studying bull sperm...