Science News

Today is 21 October 2015 - the date Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to in Back to the Future Part II. Can we reconcile the films with reality?

U.S. marijuana use has more than doubled in 10 years, in parallel with the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana use.

Around the human ear are tiny, weak muscles that once would have let evolutionary ancestors pivot their ears to and fro. Today, the muscles aren't capable of moving much -- but their reflex action still exists.

Real, levitating hoverboards do exist, thanks to quantum mechanics and the interplay between superconductors and magnetic fields. Today is the future. Specifically, it's the day to which Marty McFly and Emmett "Doc" Brow...

Scientists from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have set out to help build the world's first total-body positron emission tomography (PET) scanner, a medical imaging device...

It's here, folks: today is the day we officially enter "the future", at least according to a certain wildly-popular 1980s film trilogy. The movies in question are much-beloved here at PhysicsCentral, so after ascertainin...

Random number generators developed at ICFO - The Institute of Photonic Sciences, by the groups of ICREA Professors Morgan W. Mitchell and Valerio Pruneri, played a critical role in the historic experiment was published o...

Photo: Lisa Parker/Flickr Featured Media Resource: AUDIO: Crumb Rubber: Have Your Kids Been Exposed To A Cancer Risk? (WGBH) Hear findings from a report by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting about the deb...

In the television series Star Trek, virtual reality-chambers called "holodecks" take humans into computer-generated worlds where they interact with avatars -- and with each other. Imagine being able to visit...

The glory days of taxonomy, when new species from the mountains, jungles, deserts and oceans of the world fell into the hands of Western scientists on a daily basis, are long gone. But new species are still described fro...

Jena (Germany) Sun and wind are important sources of renewable energy, but they suffer from natural fluctuations: In stormy weather or bright sunshine electricity produced exceeds demand, whereas clouds or a lull in the ...

Studying the highest-energy particles in the cosmos provides scientists with a way to test how well they understand the cutting edge of physics. Recently, scientists using a giant particle detector at the South Pole have...

Los Angeles could be in for a fair bit of shaking in the next three years, as a magnitude 5.0 or greater earthquake is almost certain, a new model suggests.

Two populations of giant tortoise on the Galapagos island of Santa Cruz are in fact two species that arrived in separate events 1.7 and 1.3 million years ago

High-speed videos of balloons bursting could aid the development of new materials that smash safely

Nanotubes have turned up in the lungs of asthmatic children in Paris - although their source and their effects on health remain unclear

In this second instalment of our two-part data special we look at an ambitious scheme to uncover medical secrets in the numbers of everyday life

Seagrass timebomb, bees polluted path to food, Fukushima's first cancer and more

The team behind NASA's New Horizons probe has just released their first official paper on Pluto's geology, atmosphere and moons - but big mysteries remain

Collections of bacteria and archaea microbes literally wire up and exchange electrons to oxidise methane, preventing its release into the atmosphere

People at high risk of developing schizophrenia have overactive immune cells in their brains, hinting at a possible way to prevent the disorder

Widely assumed to be huge carbon sinks, vast boreal forests are increasingly hit by fires so may be releasing carbon more quickly than they store it