Science News

Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but they're also prized by oil drillers, road crews and experimental physicists for their unparalleled ability to bore, grind and cut. Now scientists have synthesized microscopic dia...

A new NASA spacecraft is about to embark on a 2-year mission to learn about how carbon dioxide -- a heat-trapping gas driving climate change -- cycles through the Earth's atmosphere.

"Phage hunts" may deliver ethanol industry's new weapons against problem bacteria.

A new experiment has demonstrated quantum tunneling over long distances -- a spooky effect where subatomic particles can pass through barriers.

At a time when we are still seeing subtle and not-so-subtle opposition to fostering young girls’ interest in STEM disciplines and to women’s mobility in professional science, it’s... --

Disguised Cell Phone Tower Look all I can see are trees here. Wikimedia Commons Even disregarding the content of a call, cell phones reveal a wealth of information about the person making the call. Called "metadata," tha...

In a bold move, Tesla Motors is making all the patents for the company's electric car technology free and available for anyone to use.

The ancestors of humans and chimpanzees may have begun genetically diverging from one another 13 million years ago, more than twice as long ago as had been widely thought, shedding new light on the process of human evolu...

What do the materials inside the Adidas Brazuca World Cup ball look like?

At a little past 7:30, just as the light of the day was beginning to fade, I walked up to the tables outside the Newseum in Washington, DC. House music thumped from inside the tents erected around the door, and through t...

The term "probiotic" is misused so often that a group of experts has taken a fresh look at what probiotics really are, and examined what scientists have learned about them in recent years.

Making machines solve meaningless puzzles to create bitcoins is a waste of computing power. What if the process could be tweaked to store knowledge instead?

The percentage of sexually active teens who use a condom has declined over the last decade, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

From male pipefish pregnancies to single-father frogs, evolution has produced some truly doting dads - and made the job surprisingly rewarding (full text available to subscribers)

An advance has been achieved towards next generation ultrasonic imaging with potentially 1,000 times higher resolution than today's medical ultrasounds. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Ber...

From speeding fines to determining how long police can track a suspect, algorithms seem good at doling out justice - but their objectivity may be an illusion

Dinosaurs may not have been cold-blooded like modern reptiles or warm-blooded like mammals and birds, but rather had blood that ran neither hot nor cold, but was of a kind of in-between that's rare nowadays, researchers ...

Parts of the Earth's lower mantle are melting, which can only happen due to the presence of lots of water. These oceans' worth of water are sealed into the blue mineral called ringwoodite, scientists have found.

Scientists have found evidence for oceans' of water locked up in a rare type of blue-colored mineral hidden beneath Earth's surface in the so-called mantle transition zone.

In a close collaborative effort, Spanish and Austrian physicists have experimentally encoded one quantum bit (qubit) in entangled states distributed over several particles and for the first time carried out simple comput...

The quantum tunnel effect manifests itself in a multitude of well-known phenomena. Experimental physicists in Innsbruck, Austria, have now directly observed quantum particles transmitting through a whole series of up to ...

A huge expanse of water trapped in a layer of the Earth's mantle could help explain the origin of our oceans