Science News

Tommy the chimpanzee was denied a writ of habeas corpus and will not be recognized as a legal person by a New York state appeals court.

Decades of destruction in the Amazon rainforest might be the reason that Brazil's taps are running dry, Brazilian scientists say. Deforestation is crippling the jungle's ability to pump moisture into the air, which could...

Magnetite (or Fe3O4) is an elaborate kind of rust -- a regular lattice of oxygen and iron atoms. But this material plays an increasingly important role as a catalyst, in electronic devices and in medical applications.

Those formerly silent walls can "talk" now: Researchers have demonstrated a simple optical technique by which audio information can be extracted from high-speed video recordings. The method uses an image-matching process...

It's a Saturday morning in June at the Royal Society in London. Computer scientists, public figures and reporters have gathered to witness or take part in a decades-old challenge.

While it may seem like pufferfish hold their breath as they inflate, they can actually breathe as they puff up. But this trick may actually tire pufferfish out and put them at risk of being eaten once they've deflated, a...

You need iron - but fortified foods are now being blamed for diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Let New Scientist guide you through the menu minefield (full text available to subscribers)

Smoking cigarettes is linked to the disappearance of the Y chromosome in the blood -- a side effect that might explain why men who smoke are at greater risk for cancer than women who smoke.

The idea of inanimate objects coming to life as intelligent beings has been around for a long time. The ancient Greeks had myths about robots, and Chinese and Egyptian engineers built automatons.

Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have been studying the behavior of iron oxide surfaces. The atomic structure of iron oxide, which had been assumed to be well-established, turned out to be wrong. The beh...

The electric eel's shocking hunting tactics ensure that fish have nowhere to run and nowhere to hide

Antarctica's ice shelves are being melted from below, which could speed up overall melting and eventually raise sea levels by around 4 metres

Men who smoke start to lose the "male" chromosome in their blood and are also more likely to get cancer, hinting at a link between the two

A photographer's obsession with a collection of abnormal brains in a storage closet, some of which are mysteriously missing, is documented in a book published today

Those formerly silent walls can "talk" now: Researchers have demonstrated a simple optical technique by which audio information can be extracted from high-speed video recordings. The method uses an image-matching process...

The synchronised courtship display of the fiddler crab may be doing it more harm than good

In quantum optics, generating entangled and spatially separated photon pairs (e.g. for quantum cryptography) is already a reality. So far, it has, however, not been possible to demonstrate an analogous generation and spa...

Taking inspiration from nature, researchers have created a versatile model to predict how stalagmite-like structures form in nuclear processing plants -- as well as how lime scale builds up in kettles.

A new technology that reveals cellular gene transcription in greater detail has been developed by Dr. Daniel Kaufmann of the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM) and the research team he directed. "Th...

"Wah! There are so many molecules in here! Let's go see what they are." Virtual assistants are more effective when they ask students about what they're doing

The mechanism making obese people have high blood pressure has been pinpointed in mice, so we might be able to make drugs to block it in humans

The Planck collaboration, which notably includes the CNRS, CEA, CNES and several French universities, has disclosed, at a conference in Ferrara, Italy, the results of four years of observations from the ESA's Planck sate...