Science News

Health advocates are calling for a ban on chewing tobacco following the untimely death of Hall-of-Famer Tony Gwynn. Critics hope that the beloved player's passing will be a wake-up call, but the practice has long been a ...

The search for the missing MH370 will be focused in the southwest Indian Ocean based on new satellite data. According to data from Inmarsat, the plane was heading south and a three-month ocean floor survey is mapping loc...

If you're watching the FIFA World Cup this year, you may have seen a free kick where the referee took out a spray can and proceeded to draw a line on the grass in front of the players.

From allowing our eyes to see, to enabling green plants to harvest energy from the sun, photochemical reactions - reactions triggered by light - are both ubiquitous and critical to nature. Photochemical reactions also pl...

Margaret Lock takes a holistic view of Alzheimer's. She warns that it's here to stay and explains why it's time to rethink one of our greatest health woes (full text available to subscribers)

A new startup uses vein recognition technology as a way for customers to make purchases using only the palms of their hands.

Bald Eagle With Camera Rob Pilley, © John Downer Productions How do you capture thousands of hours of up-close-and-personal footage of tigers, polar bears, vultures, bald eagles and penguins in their natural element in ...

A proposal claims that harnessing quantum entanglement could surpass the accuracy of any single atomic clock --

Coconut water is the focus of much hype, but is it really good for you? Experts weigh in.

The "boring billion," the long evolutionary pause when slime ruled the Earth, might be due a planetary cooling-off period that stalled plate tectonics, a new study finds.

Joanna Bourke's The Story of Pain may not be able to tell us how to suffer better, but consoles with the notion that pain can be pleasure

The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited a naval submarine and called for combat preparations and underwater warfare capabilities, according to a Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) news release from June 16.

Sound waves can be powerful - powerful enough to move large groups of particles. Recently, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced an acoustic sieve that can sift, move, trap, or align large groups of par...

The club of fellatio-loving animals just gained a new member: bears. Scientists have observed a pair of male brown bears in captivity in Croatia that regularly engaged in oral sex over several years.

Laboratory for the Spectroscopy of Planetary Atmospheres of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology has come up with a high-resolution meter to gauge the concentration of gases in the atmosphere with unparalleled prec...

Inspired by anomalies that arise in certain mathematical equations, researchers have demonstrated a laser system that paradoxically turns off when more power is added rather than becoming continuously brighter.

Scientists at the University of Bonn and the University of British Columbia have developed a novel camera system which can see around the corner without using a mirror. Using diffusely reflected light, it reconstructs th...

The arrival of the 66th antenna completes the world's largest ground-based observatory for radio waves – now it is ready to gaze deep into space

Compared with humans, computers have the capacity to solve problems at much greater speed. There are many problems, however, where computational speed alone is insufficient to find a correct or optimal solution, for exam...

All the latest on newscientist.com: eradicating another disease, e-cigs, visiting a Manhattan-sized lump of ice, robot role models, dark matter women and more

Imaging and mapping of electric fields at radio frequencies (RF) currently requires the use of metallic structures such as dipoles, probes and reference antennas. To make such measurements efficiently, the size of these ...

A UNSW Australia-led team of researchers has discovered how algae that survive in very low levels of light are able to switch on and off a weird quantum phenomenon that occurs during photosynthesis.