Science News

Animal-rights advocates seeking "personhood" for chimpanzees want to take their case to the highest court in New York State.

The FBI says North Korea forced Sony to cancel the release of Seth Rogan's film The Interview. But security experts are sceptical

Boulders the size of stretch limousines were moved by storm waves during Super Typhoon Haiyan.

To encode data, today's computer memory technology uses electric currents -- a major limiting factor for reliability and shrinkability, and the source of significant power consumption. If data could instead be encoded wi...

Instead of using invisibility cloaks to conceal objects from detection, "illusion coatings" could hide things by making them look like something else, researchers say.

A watched pot never boils and the early bird does catch the worm, but you can teach old dogs new tricks (full text available to subscribers)

Garmin's Vívosmart fitness band is part tracker, part smartwatch and part cheerleader.

Groups of common redpolls seem to be having fun while burrowing in the snow, but the behaviour may also help them survive in the Arctic

The first-ever soft landing of a robotic probe the surface of a comet has just been named the top scientific breakthrough of 2014 by the journal Science.

The Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in 2009 by NASA to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, has found yet another exoplanet, which orbits around a star much smaller and cooler than the sun. The exoplanet, ...

Airports closed and several hikers were rushed to the hospital after a volcano in Indonesia erupted Friday, spitting volcanic ash up to 2,000 meters (6,500 feet) into the air, according to the Associated Press. The count...

All the latest on newscientist.com: alien contact, weird sea ghost, Euro-GM rules, Antarctic tourism and more

Near-Earth objects about the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor shower could potentially be detected by their interaction with solar wind as they travel through space.

The Antarctic's blossoming tourist industry and warming climate could be placing penguins at greater risk of infectious diseases

Chemistry makes Christmas cookies possible, whether crispy, chewy or cake-like in texture. Here's how the combination of fat, flour and sugar can become complicated quickly.

As this is the last curation post of the year, I want to extend our team’s thanks and appreciation to readers of Singularity Hub. Your support has allowed us to continue...

Haruko Obokata, at the Riken Institute in Kobe, Japan, admitted she could not reproduce evidence of the existence of STAP cells after an eight month investigation

Reported in Scientific American, This Week in World War I: December 19, 1914 Scientific American in 1914 sometimes used large, single-theme images for the issue cover. --

The other day, a mystery showed up at the door of the PhysicsCentral offices. The inimitable Buzz Skyline discovered this mystery object in his neighborhood and brought it to H.Q. We have no idea what it is, other than...

(Phys.org)--A new study predicts that large-scale power plants based on thermoelectric effects, such as small temperature differences in ocean water, could generate electricity at a lower cost than photovoltaic power pla...

Researchers from the University of Southampton have revealed a breakthrough in optical fibre communications.

In a recent study from Lund University in Sweden, researchers have used new technology to study extremely fast processes in solar cells. The research results form a concrete step towards more efficient solar cells.