Science News

The large mima mounds in Washington are most often thought to be the work of pocket gophers, but these animals may, in fact, be innocent. Now scientists have a new explanation for the mysterious vegetation-topped mounds.

When a bunch of B. subtilis bacteria are confined within a droplet of water, a very strange thing happens. The chaotic motion of all those individual swimmers spontaneously organizes into a swirling vortex, with bacteria...

Ebola first appeared more than three decades ago, but there is still no cure or specific treatment for the disease, in part because the dangerous nature of the virus makes it difficult to study, experts say.

A new result from the Large Hadron Collider strengthens the case that the Higgs interacts with both types of particles in the Standard Model. Scientists reported in Nature Physics this week that they have found substanti...

Here is a look at seven odd hallucinations, which show that anything is possible when the brain takes a break from reality.

A newly-constructed "bee hotel" at the University of New Hampshire is at the center of the first-ever comprehensive study of New England's bee population.

Women are more likely than men to develop depression during their lifetime. Here's a look at the reasons for this difference between the genders.

The Golden Age of comic books stretched from the 1930s through the 1950s and overlapped with a time of unbridled optimism about the progress of science. People wanted to know about how the latest technology worked, and L...

Measurements taken at the molecular scale have for the first time confirmed a key property that could improve our knowledge of how the heart and lungs function.

Reframing the consequences of choices could help people boost their self-control and delay gratification, researchers say, a finding that has implications for diet, exercise and even financial decisions.

An aggressive type of trap-jaw ant with a mighty bite is gaining ground in the U.S. southeast, new research finds. The species, Odontomachus haematodus, is native to South America, but it seems to have spread recently al...

Kenya's Lake Turkana is vital for local wildlife and livelihoods, but Africa's tallest dam is going to choke it to provide much-needed power and water (full text available to subscribers)

The molecular building blocks that make up DNA absorb ultraviolet light so strongly that sunlight should deactivate them - yet it does not. Now scientists have made detailed observations of a "relaxation response" that p...

May was the warmest month ever measured on Earth since the 1880s, when cowboys battled in Wild West shootouts and the State of Liberty was built.

Can you spot a fake health crisis? Are politicians bamboozling you with numbers? Mathematics can open your eyes, says Jordan Ellenberg in How Not to Be Wrong

Dark matter with a tiny electrical charge could put the brakes on pulsars, offering a new way to look for clues to the nature of the mysterious substance

City lights, the aurora, the moon and a beautiful blue glow from the atmosphere create a gorgeous show in a new astronaut photograph of Russia.

The Higgs boson decays into matter-carrying particles known as tau leptons, yet another confirmation of the standard model of physics.

It's long been thought that stress can trigger heart attacks, and now researchers say they may know how -- in stressed people, heart attacks might be triggered by bacteria dispersing within artery walls.

Physicists from India have shed new light on a long-unanswered question related to superconductivity in so-called transition metal binary alloys. The team revealed that the local magnetic fluctuations, or spin fluctuatio...

The D-Wave computer is currently the latest link of a long chain of computers designed for the solution of optimization problems. In what sense does it realize quantum computation? We describe the evolution of such compu...

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