Science News

With over 900 deaths since March 25, the World Health Organization has declared this the worst Ebola outbreak in history, and governments around the world are acting to protect the health of their citizens.

Swordplay in film and literature today is rooted in technique from a time when swords were commonplace.

Dark matter makes up much of the universe, and surrounds us all like an invisible soup. Physicists have hunted dark matter particles for decades, but they continue to elude observation.

Bob Fraser explains what it feels like to pilot a Jetstream airliner containing passengers on 800-kilometre trips from a desk

National Geographic Traveler magazine announced the winners of this year's photography contest.

A team of engineers used little more than paper and Shrinky dinks™ -- the classic children's toy that shrinks when heated -- to build a robot that assembles itself into a complex shape in four minutes flat, and crawls ...

Thanks to this year's El Niño conditions in the Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Genevieve was reborn as it trundled west, exploding to super typhoon strength in just two days.

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park James St. John, via Wikimedia Commons According to the National Park Service, a tourist crashed a camera-equipped drone into Grand Prismatic Spring, the park's largest ge...

The sun's rays are even more essential to health than we thought. But how do you know if you're getting enough? (full text available to subscribers)

A challenge increasingly important to physicists and materials scientists in recent years has been how to design controllable new materials that exhibit desired physical properties rather than relying on those properties...

A young man's frequent nosebleeds turned out to be caused by an extra tooth in his nose, according to a new report of his case.

The latest advancement in robotics may not look like much -- just a few small batteries attached to a flat sheet of paper -- but there's much more to this new contraption than meets the eye.

IBM's latest brainlike computer chip may not be "smarter than a fifth-grader," but it can simulate millions of the brain's neurons and perform complex tasks using very little energy.

Pitch Lake, the world's largest asphalt lake, in Trinidad and Tobago holds tiny life that's hidden inside water droplets encapsulated by oil. The finding boosts promise of finding alien life in hydrocarbon lakes on Satur...

A flat chunk of butterfly-shaped plastic can folds itself into the shape of a four-legged robot - and simply walk away

Strategies for collision avoidance, acceptance and observance --

Global warming should cause low-oxygen zones in the ocean to expand, driving out marine animals, but a few zones may buck the trend

Copying the brain's structure could help build machines that are far more powerful and efficient than our current ones, say IBM researchers

Nature often builds 3D structures from flat materials. Researcher Samuel Felton and colleagues created a self-folding robot - which stands, crawls and turns - by placing hinges in shape-memory polymer which contracts at ...

For 20 years, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been the subject of intensive fundamental as well as applied research. With their extraordinary mechanical, thermal and electronic properties, these tiny tubes with their graphi...

China's capital plans to ban burning coal from 2020. If the rest of the energy-hungry country follows suit, peak coal production could be near

All the latest on newscientist.com: Lego-like bricks for bots, dove-hunting Neanderthals, cliff-jumping ants and more