Science News

Ever since the days of Aristotle, people have made the counterintuitive observation that hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold water. In modern times, the observation has been named the Mpemba effect after Erasto ...

Due to rapidly rising seas, floods that once struck New York City every 500 years will soon hit every five years

Ever realised you've driven yourself home but haven't really been paying attention? Brain scans have shown how wandering minds switch into autopilot mode

The U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory has discovered extreme "bounce," or super-elastic shape-memory properties in a material that could be applied for use as an actuator in the harshest of conditions, such as ...

The first glimpse of data from the full array of a deeply chilled particle detector operating beneath a mountain in Italy sets the most precise limits yet on where scientists might find a theorized process to help explai...

Paving the way for transforming the world's measurement system, an international task force has determined updated values for four fundamental constants of nature. The updated values comprise the last scientific piece of...

The exomoon candidate found in July is a real oddity - early calculations suggest it's huge and doesn't fit any moon formation processes we currently know

Move over Pi Day: Mayors across the U.S. are celebrating the day of the mole -- which began at 6:02 a.m. this morning (10/23) in honor of the vast number 6.02 X 10^23 -- by advocating unfettered scientific research.

The huge increase in computing performance in recent decades has been achieved by squeezing ever more transistors into a tighter space on microchips.

Imagine a tiny donut-shaped droplet, covered with wriggling worms. The worms are packed so tightly together that they must locally line up with respect to each other. In this situation, we would say the worms form a nema...

A team of researchers at Cornell University has developed a way to dramatically improve the resolution of confocal microscopy. They describe the technique in a paper they have had published in Physical Review X.

Humans have five basic senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. Other senses also help us understand and perceive the world around us.

A stem cell treatment could bring relief to millions of people with chronic lower back pain. If it works, it may help curb the opioid painkiller epidemic

Are there other planets out there like our own? If so, could other forms of life, intelligence, or civilizations inhabit them? This age-old question is a key part of the study of exoplanetology, the scientific field dedi...

Probing the views and personalities of 2000 people has found that narcissists don't much care about traditional values, but they are more racially prejudiced

Potatoes are often thought of as a comfort food -- richly mashed or crisply fried -- but when prepared the right ways, these vegetables are actually quite nutritious.

The University of Cambridge made famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking's 1966 Ph.D. thesis freely available to the public today (Oct. 23), and demand for the document has been so intense that it crashed the download website.

"Living" liquid crystals combine the properties of human-made liquid crystals with features of swimming bacteria. Scientists built an accurate model of how the crystals control the motion, transport and position of swimm...

Electromagnetism is a branch of physics that deals with all phenomena of electricity and magnetism. This field is the key foundation of our modern age of electricity and information technology. It is governed by a set of...

A newly translated 450-year-old book supposedly written by a renowned samurai provides rules of war for Japanese warriors.

At Europe's oldest battlefield, archaeologists found new clues about who fought on the skeleton-strewn grounds some 3,250 years ago.

When Einstein was working toward his PhD, he was among the first to explain how particles exhibit random motions in fluids. Diffusion is an important physical process and the Stokes-Einstein relationship describes how pa...