Science News

A start-up called Catalog claims it will be able to store a terabyte of data in a gram-sized DNA pellet, but questions remain over whether the technology is ready

(University of Bristol) Swimming bacteria can reduce the viscosity of ordinary liquids like water and make them flow more easily, sometimes down to the point where the viscosity becomes zero: the flow is then frictionles...

A young hominin who lived 3.3 million years ago had flexible feet that she could use to climb trees like a chimp, suggesting our ancestors kept this trait for a long time

Many people see the public's rejection of genetically-modified food as a failure, but I would argue it was successful public engagement, says Lesley Paterson

First it was GM food. Now battle lines are being drawn over whether crops and animals modified with CRISPR gene-editing can make it on to supermarket shelves

Biologists have created hybrid rhino embryos as a first step towards creating pure northern rhino embryos and are confident they can save the species from the brink

A controversial new study reports cannabis may not be as helpful in treating chronic pain as believed. Researchers say they have found no clear evidence that cannabis can reduce pain severity or pain interference in thos...

Game over? SUDAN, the last male northern white rhinoceros on Earth, died in March. He is survived by two females, Najin and her daughter Fatu, who live in a conservancy in Kenya. This pair (pictured) are thus the only re...

AI his frequently be biased, but a new technique may be able put fairness right at the heart of training algorithms

In 2014, a drone got tangled in the power lines outside a South Carolina prison carrying a small payload of marijuana and a cellphone. Police arrested a man in a nearby campsite who'd been running this smuggling operatio...

Similar bans in the US have saved thousands of teens from discredited "treatments", even though they have loopholes that allow religious advice

Blocking is often used to help Facebook users avoid abuse or harassment, but a bug meant 800,000 people lost this safeguard for a week

Meet four physicists who have found different ways to apply the skills they learned through their studies of the Higgs boson. The discovery of the Higgs boson, considered the missing piece of the Standard Model of partic...

The UK's largest wildfire for decades is almost under control, but peat burning below the ground risks spewing historical pollution back into the sky

Astronomers just captured a first-of-its-kind image of a newborn alien world -- which has been developing in a nursery of dust and gas for more than 5 million years.

We tap it, pump it and draw it from below the surface of every imaginable landscape, from desert to well-manicured suburban yard. It is the one essential ingredient required to sustain life. Water.

Doctors in Australia and the UK are now prescribing fewer antibiotics thanks to financial incentives and a bit of competition among peers

The boys who survived for 9 days in a flooded cave in Thailand will now have to go through a risky crash course in cave diving in order to make their way out.

A new discovery finds that our ancestors' toddlers had a special toe that made them better suited for climbing compared to the adults.

(University of Sussex) Highly educated women are an untapped but potentially lucrative market for electric vehicle sales because they have greater environmental and fuel efficiency awareness than men, says a new study by...

(Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati) Locking DNA knots in place thanks to DNA propensity to be supercoiled. A new study by SISSA suggests that is one of the mechanisms that could be harnessed by the cellul...

(Simons Foundation) An international team of astronomers has discovered an ancient and dramatic head-on collision between the Milky Way and a smaller object, dubbed the 'Sausage' galaxy. The cosmic crash was a defining e...