Science News

One of the deep problems in understanding the brain is to understand how relatively simple computing units (the neurons), collectively perform extremely complex operations (thinking).

Latest research from scientists from our Department of Physics into cutting-edge 'spin physics' could herald the arrival of a revolutionary new technology - 'valleytronics'.

The interiors of several of our Solar System's planets and moons are icy, and ice has been found on distant extrasolar planets, as well. But these bodies aren't filled with the regular kind of water ice that you avoid on...

In all likelihood, you probably have never opened your browser and searched for illegal drugs or guns, but that doesn't mean they aren't for sale online. When you type something into a search engine,...

Origami-inspired engineering techniques could help researchers develop stretchy conductors for flexible plasma-screen displays and, eventually, solar panels that can bend to follow sunlight, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Houston have devised a new formula for calculating the maximum efficiency of thermoelectric materials, the first new formula in more than a half-century, designed to speed up the develo...

Imagine your video camera shooting at a frame-rate in the quadrillionths of a second.

Luminous, filamentous noctilucent clouds glow over the North Pole in new NASA images.

If you like cotton candy, you'll love electrospinning.

The world's first non-invasive test for malaria could slash the costs of diagnosis - and only takes 20 seconds to detect parasite poo in the blood

General relativity and Noether’s theorem take center stage in two live Web broadcasts this week --

Machine learning and data science will do more to improve healthcare than all the biological sciences combined. This post is about how we're going to gather that health data, mine it...

More than two-thirds of women and three-fourths of men in the U.S. are now either overweight or obese, according to a new study.

A star-studded group of campaigners are promoting Asteroid Day to raise awareness of the threat of incoming rocks. Are we really facing imminent disaster?

One of the earliest modern humans in Europe had a surprisingly recent Neanderthal ancestor, possibly a great-great-grandfather. The finding suggests the two species interbred in Europe and more recently than once thought...

A major transition in the evolution of life – from single to multicellular organisms – could be kicked off by the mutation of a single gene

Physicists at UC San Diego have developed a new way to control the transport of electrical currents through high-temperature superconductors--materials discovered nearly 30 years ago that lose all resistance to electrici...

It may be significantly easier to design electronic components in future. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids have discovered that the electrical resistance of a compound of niobium and ...

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A new experimental algorithm from Facebook's artificial intelligence lab can recognise people in photographs even when it can't see their faces

Lightning dart across the sky in a flash. And even though we can use lightning rods to increase the probability of it striking at a specific location, its exact path remains unpredictable. At a smaller scale, discharges ...

A human skull, on average, is about 0.3 inches thick, or roughly the depth of the latest smartphone. Human skin, on the other hand, is about 0.1 inches, or about three grains of salt, deep.