Science News

A 14-year old boy in Missouri who appeared to choke on a ham and cheese sandwich turned out to have a rare immune condition that can injure the esophagus.

An area known for high-tech gadgets and innovation will soon be home to an advanced superconducting X-ray laser that stretches 3 miles in length, built by a collaboration of national laboratories. On January 19, the firs...

MIT researchers have developed hardware that uses electric fields to move droplets of chemical or biological solutions around a surface, mixing them in ways that could be used to test thousands of reactions in parallel.

In the race to build a computer that mimics the massive computational power of the human brain, researchers are increasingly turning to memristors, which can vary their electrical resistance based on the memory of past a...

With the first parts of this series (read part I, part II, and part III), we've built up the idea that the electric charge of a particle is very closely analogous to the angular momentum of an eddy in a fluid. Alike-spin...

Charge ordering in mixed-valence compounds, which usually contain positively charged cations in more than one formal charge state, is of crucial importance for materials science. Many functional properties of materials l...

A Fermilab team built and tested the first new superconducting accelerator cryomodule for SLAC's LCLS-II project. Earlier this week, scientists and engineers at the US Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator La...

Dice from archaeological digs in the Netherlands and the UK became fairer 600 years ago - 250 years before we began to really understand probability

A single study has been hailed for narrowing the range of possible climate change scenarios, but figuring out how the world will warm is more complicated than headlines suggest

Mining asteroids might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but there are companies and a few governments already working hard to make it real. This should not be surprising: compared with the breathtaking bridges tha...

The Chinese satellite Micius has once again shattered records, this time enabling practical quantum encryption between Beijing and Austria.

High-energy particles that can strip away planetary atmospheres and cause biological damage might also forge the complex organic molecules that give rise to life

A joint China-Austria team has performed quantum key distribution between the quantum-science satellite Micius and multiple ground stations located in Xinglong (near Beijing), Nanshan (near Urumqi), and Graz (near Vienna...

Physicists have experimentally demonstrated an information engine--a device that converts information into work--with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics. Instead, the engine's effici...

If you love your job and work hard but feel you get little recognition or reward, you could be on the road to chronic stress, burnout and other health issues

A 19th-century 'rule' connecting animal body size and environmental temperature has been challenged, allaying fears that animals may decrease in size as the climate gets warmer

While CRISPR is great at turning off and disabling genes, it isn't very good at fixing faulty ones. But a powerful new method could change that

On the way to an intelligent laboratory, physicists from Innsbruck and Vienna present an artificial agent that autonomously designs quantum experiments. In initial experiments, the system has independently (re)discovered...

Despite their charm and allure, diamonds are rarely perfect. They have tiny defects that, to assistant professor Nathalie de Leon, make them ever so appealing. These atom-sized mistakes have enormous potential in technol...

Hundreds of species of primate all form groups of the same five sizes, suggesting that the ecosystems in which they live strongly shape their lifestyles

The growing use in Europe of trawl nets that stun fish with electricity has divided opinion. It should be scaled back and properly researched, says Lesley Evans Ogden

Researchers from the Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis (LAMBDA) at the Higher School of Economics have improved their method of analyzing ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) with the use of mobile phones. The...