Science News

Wind turbines are a valuable source of renewable energy, but it can be hard to find a good place to put them. They need to be close to a populated area so that transporting the power they generate isn't too expensive--bu...

The process of extracting natural gas from the earth or transporting it through pipelines can release methane into the atmosphere. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a greenhouse gas with a warming potenti...

The bad, old days NO GOOD deed, cynics say, goes unpunished. That is certainly the view of longline fishermen in southern Alaska. The good deed in question is the end of commercial whaling, courtesy of a moratorium agree...

Unfounded health fears mean Europe is on the brink of banning the herbicide, risking greater soil damage and higher carbon emissions

Stimulating the brain to treat depression can spark a fit of fury in a small number of people, psychiatrists warn

A care bot's deployment in the UK has come under fire, but I would have welcomed robotic help for my elderly mother, says author Paul Kitcatt

Imagine eating all of the candy you acquire on Halloween each year in a single night. If you're a bat and winter's approaching, this challenge is no problem.

The current plague outbreak in Madagascar has killed more than 100 people, and officials say that a centuries-old tradition may increase the risk of further spread, according to news reports.

Maybe intelligent life is widespread throughout the galaxy, but most of it lives in deep, dark subsurface oceans that are cut off from the rest of the cosmos.

Silicon has provided enormous benefits to the power electronics industry. But performance of silicon-based power electronics is nearing maximum capacity.

THESE pictures are of the plate of a mariner's astrolabe, the earliest known, which was raised in 2014 from a wreck off the coast of Oman. The complete instrument would also have had a rotating pointer, called an alidade...

Beautiful plumage IN RECENT years it has become clear that many, if not all, dinosaurs belonging to a group called the theropods had feathers. One line of these creatures gave rise to birds. But the rest, though they cou...

A WISE driver keeps an eye on the fuel gauge, to make timely stops at filling stations. For drivers of electric cars, though, those stations are few and far between. The infrastructure needed for refilling batteries has ...

Grace C. Young is fascinated by fundamental questions about realms both quantum and undersea. Each summer, the international research laboratory CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, welcomes dozens of students to wor...

A team of researchers with Universit degli Studi di Padova and the Matera Laser Ranging Observatory in Italy has conducted experiments that add credence to John Wheeler's quantum theory thought experiment. In their paper...

Scientists have taken an important step towards using 'twisted' light as a form of wireless, high-capacity data transmission which could make fibre-optics obsolete.

Puerto Rico is an archipelago in the Caribbean Sea and an unincorporated U.S. territory.

Every mealtime it's the same thing. Your child clutching their stomach and complaining about tummy ache. You as parents are at your wits' end, and nothing you try from your home medicine cabinet is having any effect. Cou...

Physicists from the University of Lille, in collaboration with the University of Ferrara in Italy, have introduced a river into an optical laboratory... They have just observed the rupture of a photon barrier in an optic...

X-rays interact weakly with matter. This is their greatest strength for many applications, but also a fundamental weakness for others. In particular the fields of nonlinear optics and quantum optics, mainstays for both f...

When it comes to entirely new, faster, more powerful computers, Majorana fermions may be the answer. These hypothetical particles can do a better job than conventional quantum bits (qubits) of light or matter. Why? Becau...

Combining speed with incredible precision, a team of Molecular Foundry scientists and industry users developed a way to print extremely small devices on the tip of a glass fiber as thin as a human hair. These tiny device...