Science News

Researchers recently unraveled the mystery of how popcorn pops, capturing the transformation from kernel to popcorn in extreme slow motion of 2000 frames per second; played here 100x more slowly.

Researchers working at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have captured the first X-ray portraits of living bacteria.

In a paper published yesterday in the journal Physical Review Letters, the COMPASS experiment at CERN reports a key measurement on the strong interaction. The strong interaction binds quarks into protons and neutrons, an...

Your phone, TV and light bulbs would be duds without a host of hard-to-find elements you've probably never heard of. Should you be worried? (full text available to subscribers)

(University of Southern California) Scientists stitched together two unrelated molecules to create a drug that targets and suppresses prostate tumors in mice.

The polar vortex is sending cold air to the East again. Research continues into role warming might play.

People with mental disorders are two times more likely to die early than their peers in the general population -- and not just because of factors like suicide, a new study suggests.

Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) is on the rise. The condition, caused by immune cells gathering in the esophagus, makes it "progressively harder to swallow," according to Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

How did the Romans release wild animals into their mighty Colosseum? How did the massive Hagia Sophia cathedral in Istanbul withstand centuries of earthquakes? And how did a desert people carve elaborate tombs in rocky c...

As a kid, I devoured Star Trek: The Next Generation, and though it now appears nearly as campy as the original series did back then, I still love it. But...

A massive outpouring of carbon dioxide from the deep ocean helped end the last ice age, scientists report today.

The iconic birds from the Galapagos islands may be more diverse than they look, a genome study suggests

All the latest on newscientist.com: war trauma through generations, a spy in your toaster, geoengineering, glass ceiling, Ebola and more

The steep fall in new Ebola cases is good news - but it makes it difficult to run trials of new drugs and vaccines that might prevent the next outbreak

At Minecon 2013, the annual convention for players of the staggeringly popular video game Minecraft, representatives from Caltech, Google, E-Line Media, and MinecraftEDU announced a new mod for the game aimed at introduc...

High-power microwaves are frequently used in civil applications, such as radar and communication systems, heating and current drive of plasmas in fusion devices, and acceleration in high-energy linear colliders. They can...

The European Space Agency's IXV spaceplane passed the first test of its ability to re-enter Earth's atmosphere, crucial for future space missions

With more and more of our domestic appliances vying for data, how much longer will the secrets of our home stay secret? (full text available to subscribers)

ON EARTH it is a fact of public life that politicians love to trumpet new infrastructure but take much less interest in maintaining what already exists. The same rule, it appears, applies in outer space. Many satellites ...

Equality at the bottom of the corporate ladder is more likely to help female advancement than quotas in the boardroom, a mathematical model has found

The universe is smiling today -- at least, that's what it looks like in a new space photo that appears to feature a smiling face emerging from the light of the universe.

If you want to unravel the secrets of proton spin, put a "twist" in your colliding proton beams. This technique, tried and perfected at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)--a particle collider and U.S. Department ...