Science News

To have and to hold SEX is ubiquitous, but sexual intercourse is not. On dry land, it is more or less de rigueur. Sperm and eggs risk dessication otherwise. Mammals, birds and reptiles do it. Insects... do it. Even snails do, it--firing darts at each other as part of the preliminaries. But many creatures live in the oceans, and a lot of them simply broadcast eggs and sperm into the water and hope that these will meet. Even those marine animals that do come together to mate--bony fish, for example--often employ external fertilisation. That has led researchers to assume that copulation, in which a male's sperm are inserted into a female's reproductive tract, and fertilisation takes place therein, is a derivative rather than an original characteristic of the vertebrate line that leads from the...

Many "brain-training" games may be marketed as a way to boost people's alertness and intelligence, but scientists are now warning that such claims are not based on actual science.

The flu virus is responsible for about 36,000 deaths in the U.S. every year, but the common killer hardly elicits the same panic as Ebola, a disease that has devastated parts of Guinea, Liberia and... Sierra Leone, but has killed just one person in the U.S.

One man who contracted Ebola and even had further complications of the infection has now recovered after receiving routine intensive care at a hospital in Germany.

Hidden in ice for more than 100 years, the photography notebook of a British explorer on Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated expedition to Antarctica has been found.

When snow and ice thawed during the Antarctic summer last year, a lost notebook was revealed near the century-old base camp that British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott established at Cape Evans.

A doctor who recently arrived in the United States from West Africa is being tested for Ebola at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, according to the city's health department.

A striking black-and-white photo of lions took first prize at the 50th Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, but the international panel of judges awarded a handful of other gifted artists of... all ages.

The online Slooh Community Observatory will air a special three-hour solar eclipse webcast Thursday starting at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT). You can watch the show at ://.slooh.com, or here at Space.com,... courtesy of Slooh.

Eternal health, brain uploads, the end of privacy... with technological innovations coming at breakneck speed, how will they affect our evolution? (full text available to subscribers)

Epidemics like Ebola often start when people make contact with animals carrying infectious diseases, but, paradoxically, a certain amount of human exposure to a virus at its source can actually also... prevent the extensive spread of a disease, new researc

A stunning black-and-white photo of five lionesses relaxing with their cubs in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park has taken the top prize at the 50th Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition,... held this week at London's Natural History Museum.

Lebanon is grappling with its first suspected case of Ebola after a man who arrived from West Africa checked himself into a hospital with symptoms of the disease, the country's health minister... announced Thursday, according to the Associated Press. The patient, a Lebanese national, had returned from West Africa earlier in the week and has been quarantined while health workers await the results of an Ebola test, which could take two days to obtain, the minister said.

An ancient rock shelter nestled high in the Peruvian Andes reveals that humans have been living at extreme heights thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

A new microscope can show chromosomes moving within a cell or tiny changes in a growing embryo. --

An ancient rock shelter nestled high in the Peruvian Andes reveals that humans have been living at extreme heights thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

Over the last decade, powerful new microscopes have dramatically sharpened biologists' focus on the molecules that animate and propel life. Now, a new imaging platform developed by Eric Betzig and... colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus offers another leap forward for light microscopy. The new technology collects high-resolution images rapidly and minimizes damage to cells, meaning it can image the three-dimensional activity of molecules, cells, and embryos in fine detail over longer periods than was previously possible.

Yesterday was a really rough day for Ottawa residents, particularly those that live and work around downtown. Dozens of my friends and family were affected, even though none of them were directly near... where the tragic events took place. They were in lockdown downtown, or reporting on the story, or both. It’s been hard listening […]

An Oculus Rift headset puts you onto the ship piloted by Matthew McConaughey in the new science fiction blockbuster, Interstellar

The rare Apple-1 computer, which is now the most expensive Apple computer ever sold, was built by Steve Wozniak in Steve Jobs' garage in the summer of 1976. The computer still has its original... keyboard, power supply and monitor.

Modifying neurons to flash as electrical impulses pass along them lets researchers grow light-up brains in a dish and eavesdrop on their chatter

Written 20 years ago, the first algorithm to tap into the ultra-fast potential of quantum computing has been run on a real machine at long last

All the latest on newscientist.com: 10 revolutions that made us human, personal helicopters on sale in two years, making babies with Neanderthals and more

A new implantable brain chip developed by the University of Madison-Wisconsin may help advance our understanding of the human brain. The chip is flexible, transparent, biocompatible--and uses a... graphene sensor array just four atoms thick. To understand a system, we have to observe it, and so far, observing the living brain has proven […]

A Halloween-themed activity from Science Buddies --