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...

Recent research has yielded new information about immune responses associated with -- and potentially responsible for -- protection from HIV infection, providing leads for new strategies to develop an HIV vaccine. Result...

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...

Doc Brown's time machine is a nuclear powered, stainless-steel flying car.

Researchers will launch the first Phase 1 human trials of a drug -- derived from the female hormone estrogen -- that may help patients with severe bleeding survive long enough to get to appropriate medical care. The drug...

Researchers report a single chemical reaction that couples two constituent chemicals into a carbon-carbon bond, while simultaneously introducing a nitrogen component.

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.

Latinos with African ancestry are at a higher risk for high pressure within the eye, a condition that if untreated can damage the optic nerve and impair vision, according to a report.

Paging Charles Darwin: The island of Santa Cruz within the Galápagos has not one but two distinct species of giant tortoise, a new genetic study finds.

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

Patients undergoing oncologic liver operations who participated in an enhanced recovery program returned sooner to their normal life function and adjuvant cancer therapies than patients who were treated with a traditiona...

Even in a calm, unchanging environment, cells are not static. Among other actions, cells activate and then deactivate some types of transcription factors -- proteins that control the expression of genes -- in unpredictab...

Delivering the hormone leptin directly to the brain through gene therapy aids weight loss without the significant side effect of bone loss, according to new research.