Since it first exploded into existence 13.8 billion years ago, the universe has been expanding, dragging along with it hundreds of billions of galaxies and stars, much like raisins in a rapidly rising dough. | Continue reading
For lovers throughout the animal kingdom, finding a suitable mate requires the right chemistry. Now, scientists at The Rockefeller University have been able to map an unexpected path in which evolution arranged for animals to choose the correct partner. | Continue reading
Two thousand years ago the Mediterranean Sea was a haven for two species of whale which have since virtually disappeared from the North Atlantic, a new study analysing ancient bones suggests. | Continue reading
Researchers from Aalto University are designing nano-sized quantum heat engines to explore whether they may be able to outperform classical heat engines in terms of power and efficiency. | Continue reading
Despite the rise of solid-state drives, magnetic storage devices such as conventional hard drives and magnetic tapes are still very common. But as our data-storage needs are increasing at a rate of almost 15 million gigabytes per day, scientists are turning to alternative storage … | Continue reading
IBM is reaching beyond digital technologies with a capacitor-based cross-point array for analog neural networks, exhibiting potential orders of magnitude improvements in deep learning computations. Analog computing architectures exploit the storage capability and physical attribu … | Continue reading
If, like Rip Van Winkle, you've been asleep for the last decade and have just woken up, that flip phone you have has become super-popular among retro technologists and survivalists alike, and, oh yeah, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is either going to kill you or save you. | Continue reading
A decade ago, Apple opened a store peddling iPhone apps, unlocking the creativity of software developers and letting users truly make their mobile devices their own. | Continue reading
Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) and overseas have discovered the oldest colours in the geological record, 1.1 billion-year-old bright pink pigments extracted from rocks deep beneath the Sahara desert in Africa. | Continue reading
Scientists at UCLA, for the first time, experimentally realized a new compound single crystal, boron arsenide (BAs) and explored its thermal conductivity limit when crystals are free of defects. They observed the highest isotropic thermal conductivity, 1300 W/mK, beyond all commo … | Continue reading
Carnegie's Eduardo Bañados led a team that found a quasar with the brightest radio emission ever observed in the early universe, due to it spewing out a jet of extremely fast-moving material. | Continue reading
Octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish often do not follow the genetic instructions in their DNA to the letter. Instead, they use enzymes to pluck out specific adenosine RNA bases (some of As, out of the As, Ts, Gs, and Us of RNA) that codes for proteins and replace them with a differe … | Continue reading
The unique features of your face can allow you to unlock your new iPhone, access your bank account or even "smile to pay" for some goods and services. | Continue reading
Einstein's understanding of gravity, as outlined in his general theory of relativity, predicts that all objects fall at the same rate, regardless of their mass or composition. This theory has passed test after test here on Earth, but does it still hold true for some of the most m … | Continue reading
New research by a trans-Atlantic team of scientists suggests that bacteria could survive in briny chemicals that exist on Mars, Enceladus, Europa, Pluto and possibly elsewhere. | Continue reading
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 frictionless. | Continue reading
More than 3 million years ago, our ancient human ancestors, including their toddler-aged children, were standing on two feet and walking upright, according to a new study published in Science Advances. | Continue reading
Each night, dramatic aerial battles are waged above our heads, complete with barrel rolls, razor-sharp turns, sonar jamming, cloaking devices and life-or-death consequences. | Continue reading
Months after the death of Sudan, the world's last male northern white rhino, scientists said Wednesday they have grown embryos containing DNA of his kind, hoping to save the subspecies from extinction. | Continue reading
Drop a marble and a cannon ball off the Leaning Tower of Pisa at the same time and they will hit the ground at the same time. That fact is explained by Albert Einstein's theory of gravity—general relativity—which predicts that all objects fall in the same way, regardless of their … | Continue reading
Scientists have found that molecular oxygen around comet 67P is not produced on its surface, as some suggested, but may be from its body. | Continue reading
University of Alberta neuroscientists have identified the neural circuit that may underlay intelligence in birds, according to a new study. The discovery is an example of convergent evolution between the brains of birds and primates, with the potential to provide insight into the … | Continue reading
Modern civilization relies on water's incompressibility—it's something we take for granted. Hydraulic systems harness the virtual non-compressibility of fluids like water or oil to multiply mechanical force. Bulldozers, cranes, and other heavy machinery exploit the physics of hyd … | Continue reading
Scientists at Washington State University and China Jiliang University have discovered that the quality of the host rice plant determines whether the brown planthopper, a major pest on rice in Asia, grows short wings or long wings. | Continue reading
Increased water vapor in Earth's atmosphere due to human activities is making shimmering high-altitude clouds more visible, a new study finds. The results suggest these strange but increasingly common clouds seen only on summer nights are an indicator of human-caused climate chan … | Continue reading
Cyberattacks may become impossible with the creation of the first practical quantum random number generator. | Continue reading
Astronomers led by a group at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany have captured a spectacular snapshot of planetary formation around the young dwarf star PDS 70. By using the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT)—one of the most powerful … | Continue reading
At any given time, people regularly return to a maximum of 25 places. This is the finding of a scientific study that reveals entirely new aspects of human behavior. | Continue reading
A rocket developed by a maverick Japanese entrepreneur and convicted fraudster exploded shortly after liftoff Saturday, in a major blow to his bid to send Japan's first privately backed rocket into space. | Continue reading
Since the 1990s, astrophysicists have known that for the past few billion years, the Universe has been experiencing an accelerated rate of expansion. This gave rise to the theory that the Universe is permeated by a mysterious invisible energy known as "dark energy", which acts ag … | Continue reading
Magnets, whether in the form of a bar, horseshoe or electromagnet, always have two poles. If you break a magnet in half, you'll end up with two new magnets, each with its own magnetic north and south. | Continue reading
By abusing security weaknesses in the LTE mobile telephony standard, attackers are able to identify which web pages a user visits and to reroute him to a scam website. This is the result of a study carried out by security experts from Horst Görtz Institute at Ruhr-Universität Boc … | Continue reading
Is the web browser on your phone slower than usual? It could be mining bitcoin for criminals. | Continue reading
The galaxy is rich in grease-like molecules, according to an Australian-Turkish team. Astronomers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney (UNSW), and Ege University in Turkey used a laboratory to manufacture material with the same properties as interstellar dust and used t … | Continue reading
Using mass spectrometry data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists found that large, carbon-rich organic molecules are ejected from cracks in the icy surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Southwest Research Institute scientists think chemical reactions between the moon's rocky … | Continue reading
In the developing face, how do stem cells know whether to become cartilage, bones or teeth? To begin to answer this question, scientists from the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Gage Crump tested the role of a key family of genes, called "Forkhead-domain transcription factors," or Fo … | Continue reading
A fresh blueprint outlining how to rebuild the Internet to make it super slick at handling rising traffic from new technologies has been unveiled by scientists. | Continue reading
Researchers at Kyoto University have found that molybdenum silicides can improve the efficiency of turbine blades in ultrahigh-temperature combustion systems. | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of York have shown that a new quantum-based procedure for distributing secure information along communication lines could be successful in preventing serious security breaches. | Continue reading
Scientists have solved the riddle behind one of the most recognisable, and annoying, household sounds: the dripping tap. And crucially, they have also identified a simple solution to stop it, which most of us already have in our kitchens. | Continue reading
Scientists have solved the riddle behind one of the most recognisable, and annoying, household sounds: the dripping tap. And crucially, they have also identified a simple solution to stop it, which most of us already have in our kitchens. | Continue reading
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are small solar system bodies whose orbits sometimes bring them close to the Earth, potentially threatening a collision. NEOs are tracers of the composition, dynamics and environmental conditions throughout the solar system and of the history of our plan … | Continue reading
Art curators will be able to recover images on daguerreotypes, the earliest form of photography that used silver plates, after a team of scientists led by Western University learned how to use light to see through degradation that has occurred over time. | Continue reading
European aviation giant Airbus warned Thursday it could be forced to pull out of the UK if Britain leaves the European Union without a deal. | Continue reading
Information is typically stored in physical systems, such as memory devices. But in a new study, physicists have investigated an alternative way to store and hide information, which is by storing it only in the quantum correlations among two or more systems, rather than in the sy … | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have helped to find the last reservoir of ordinary matter hiding in the universe. | Continue reading
It is hoped that cells created in a test tube can answer some of the major questions in biology. What is the minimum that a cell needs in order to live? And how did life on Earth begin? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdebu … | Continue reading
A major challenge in current climate prediction models is how to accurately represent clouds and their atmospheric heating and moistening. This challenge is behind the wide spread in climate prediction. Yet accurate predictions of global warming in response to increased greenhous … | Continue reading