Science News

What does the name Alessandro have that Howard doesn't? With its double S's and Greek origin, it's just sexier, according to an online survey on male and female names.

Beyond the genome, 3D printing is bringing a new dimension to personalized health care.

During their first run, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider rediscovered 50 years' worth of physics research in a single month. In 2010, the brand-spanking-new CMS and ATLAS detectors started taking data for the fir...

Adventurer and aeronaut Bertrand Piccard is poised to take to the skies in a sun-powered plane that's wider than a 747 but only as heavy as a family car

In the courtroom, don't assume the "science" is up to academic standards.

We're getting ready to send a probe to Jupiter's icy moon - but how will we know if anything lives there?

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have invented a novel pretreatment technology that could cut the cost of biofuels production by about 30 percent or more by dramatically reducing the amount of enzym...

All languages evolve over time, but finding how and when certain changes happen is a daunting task for linguists faced with an overwhelming amount of data. Now researchers from the U.S. and the U.K. have used a statistic...

Mysterious flooding and high tides along the East Coast in 2009 and 2010 now have an explanation: a major change in the Atlantic Ocean's wind patterns and warm-water currents.

NASA's Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite shows wind blown Saharan dust nourishes plants with phosphorus, which is in limited supply in the Amazon.

Researchers at McGill University have developed a new, low-cost method to build DNA nanotubes block by block -- a breakthrough that could help pave the way for scaffolds made from DNA strands to be used in applications s...

Alaska joins Colorado and Washington as the third U.S. state to legalize the recreational use marijuana.

The University of Minnesota and the Center for Sustainable Polymers are using computer modeling to re-create plastic without using petroleum and natural gas. The goal is to create products that are less hazardous to the ...

All the latest on newscientist.com: gerbils blamed for plague, moon race, rats that can't get drunk, a bat that lives in a carnivorous plant, and more.

Carrying a full cup of coffee from the kitchen to the dining room can be precarious for a sleepy-eyed caffeine addict who might accidentally send a wave of java sloshing over the rim. But add a bit of foam to the top and...

Newly developed tiny antennas, likened to spotlights on the nanoscale, offer the potential to measure food safety, identify pollutants in the air and even quickly diagnose and treat cancer, according to the Australian sc...

We tend to think of cars as a mature technology. They're good enough to be boring. But something weird is happening. Silicon Valley is eyeing the car business. First it was...

Newly developed tiny antennas, likened to spotlights on the nanoscale, offer the potential to measure food safety, identify pollutants in the air and even quickly diagnose and treat cancer, according to the Australian sc...

Carrying a full cup of coffee from the kitchen to the dining room can be precarious for a sleepy-eyed caffeine addict who might accidentally send a wave of java sloshing over the rim. But add a bit of foam to the top and...

The ancestor to modern-day hippos lived in Africa about 28 million years ago and wasn't much bigger than a sheep, new research suggests.

Surge in wind power sees share of electricity from renewable sources double between 2010 and 2013, driving down carbon emissions

Superconductor materials are prized for their ability to carry an electric current without resistance, but this valuable trait can be crippled or lost when electrons swirl into tiny tornado-like formations called vortice...