Science News

A team of U.S. scientists has discovered how carbon dioxide limits the ability of plants to deal with heat and drought. The discovery, reported in this week's early online edition of the journal Nature, is boosting hopes...

Barnacle Hull House U.S. Navy via Flickr A ship at anchor isn't necessarily quiet. Many crews leave their generators on while at anchor, to power refrigerators or air conditioners. But maybe they should consider shutting...

Some health fairs offer to screen people for a buildup of plaque in blood vessels in their neck, but new guidelines recommend against such screening in people who do not have symptoms.

The remains of an ancient human in China not thought to be Neanderthal unexpectedly possesses an inner ear much like that of humans' closest extinct relatives, according to a new study.

The berg winds of southern Africa are seen blowing plumes of dust off the Namibian coast in a new astronaut image. These hot, dry winds originate from inland mountains and blow dust toward the sea.

Humans were building in the Amazon before the rainforest existed, according to a new study of the ancient ecology of northeastern Bolivia. Mysterious earthen ditches were made when the region was a savanna.

Water could have flowed on the surface of Mars with the help of salts in the Martian soil that can melt ice, just as salts on Earth can be used to melt ice on slippery winter roads and sidewalks, researchers say.

Researchers have found a series of earthworks, including ringlike ditches, scattered throughout the Amazon rainforest of Boliva and Brazil were there before the forest emerged.

This extinct flier would've sported a wingspan of some 17 feet across, gliding through the skies about 25 million years ago and taking out prey with toothy projections from its jaw.

European scientists have called for the review of a major neuroscience initiative, criticizing the program for taking a narrow approach that they say is likely to fail.

Under extremely high pressure conditions oxygen molecules group into quartets and give rise to a 'dance of their magnetic moments.' This, as observed in a new study carried out by SISSA in collaboration with ICTP and pub...

The solar cell of the future will be flexible, highly efficient and oh-so cheap - just as long as we can make it work in the rain (full text available to subscribers)

Pelagornis sandersi was twice the width of a wandering albatross – the largest living bird – but was nevertheless dwarfed by the biggest pterosaurs

In No Requiem for the Space Age, a new history of NASA's Apollo programme, Matthew D. Tribbe says the moon landings came too late for Americans tired of war

Ghana is treating its first suspected case of Ebola, the BBC reported Monday. The patient, reportedly an American who had visited Sierra Leone as well, is being treated at the Nyaho Clinic in the capital city of Accra.

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Singularity University has a mission--use technology to positively impact the lives of a billion people in ten years. That’s easy enough to say, but you don't make big changes without big ambition. And if there's a tim...

Photograph by Travis Rathbone Only Scott Toth knew exactly how this would go. He deftly hooked his tow truck to a gleaming white 2012 Chevy Cruze in a matter of seconds. A young woman in the passenger seat jumped out and...

Testosterone supplements are sold as a cure-all for anything that might ail the ageing male, from erectile dysfunction to spare tyre – but do they really work?

Techniques for controlling ultra-cold atoms travelling in ring traps currently represent an important research area in physics. A new study gives a proof of principle, confirmed by numerical simulations, of the applicabi...

The agencies and laboratory directors gathered at the International Meeting on Large Neutrino Infrastructures hosted by APPEC in Paris on 23 and 24 June 2014, agreed that the understanding of the neutrino sector is a wor...

Alicia Boole Stott, the third daughter of mathematician George Boole, is probably best known for establishing the term "polytope" for a convex solid in four dimensions. Alicia was also a long time collaborator of HSM Cox...