Science News

Bill Gates wants to turn your poop into clean drinking water, and he's got just the machine to do it.

Episiotomy, the deliberate cutting of a woman's perineum during childbirth, is on the decline. But where a woman delivers strongly influences her chance of undergoing this procedure.

The Ebola outbreak in Liberia could be largely brought to an end by June -- if the country stays on track with getting a high percentage of the people who are ill to hospitals, a new study predicts.

We can't put people on the Red Planet yet, but break the mission into bite-sized chunks and 2030 looks possible, says NASA science supremo Ellen Stofan (full text available to subscribers)

Zombie bill resurrected to push science aside in U.S. policy.

Orca clan calls and dolphin "tail-walking" provide clues to cetacean culture, find Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell in The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

Learn about the Singularity University Labs Startup Accelerator here, and submit your application by January 23rd. Selected teams will be notified of their participation by February 14th. The inaugural class...

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy recently spit out the largest X-ray flare ever seen in that region, astronomers reported this week at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Socie...

All the latest on newscientist.com: banter of the apes, oil price and the environment, lizard penises, Kiwi comedown, space weather report and more

An article in Physical Review Letters, which was written by a group of researchers led by Qinggao Wang from MIPT's Laboratory of Computer Design of New Materials, investigates the surface of titanium dioxide crystals.

Researchers at Kavli IPMU and their collaborators have revealed that considering environmental effects such as a gravitational tidal force spread over a scale much larger than a galaxy cluster is indispensable to explain...

They say size matters, but what of speed? In some lizards, penises have been evolving incredibly quickly - up to six times faster than other traits

Dark matter might be made up of a type of particle not many scientists are looking for: the axion. The ADMX experiment seems to be an exercise in contradictions. Dark matter, the substance making up 85 percent of all the...

Runners using aluminum blankets to keep warm. Credit: Adapted from Ian Hunter | flickr If you've ever stood exposed and shivering at the end of a run, you'll know just how quickly the body loses heat without protective c...

Researchers are using drones to map the algae that grows on the underside of sea ice in the Antarctic.

A halving of oil prices is hailed as good news for cash-strapped consumers. But there could also be unexpected gains for the environment, says Fred Pearce

Beneath the cold waves of Lake Michigan rests an aging shipwreck, its wooden planks encrusted with brown-and-gray zebra mussels, that may be the remnants of a 17th-century ship called the Griffin, two Michigan-based trea...

(Phys.org)--Information can never be stored perfectly. Whether on a CD, a hard disk drive, or a piece of papyrus, technological imperfections create noise that limits the preservation of information over time. But even i...

When it comes to determining the size of giant squid and other giant sea animals, human beings have a tendency to exaggerate, a new study suggests.

A controversial fund for expensive new cancer medicines is good for big pharma but has brought real harm for patients, says health economist Karl Claxton

A research team led by North Carolina State University has made two advances in multiferroic materials, including the ability to integrate them on a silicon chip, which will allow the development of new electronic memory...

As governments look at security policies following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the US Central Command's Twitter feed was briefly the victim of a hacking war