The reversal of France’s fuel tax sends a worrying message to world leaders meeting this week in Poland to firm up climate commitments, says Olive Heffernan | Continue reading
Like humans, parrots have big brains and good communication skills – now we know the DNA regulating parrot and human brain development evolved in a similar way | Continue reading
House geckos are too big to float using surface tension, and too small to create enough force to walk across water, so they use a combination of these tricks | Continue reading
Facebook used to “move fast and break things”, but now everything is broken. Here’s what governments can do to reign in the tech giants | Continue reading
The news of gene-edited twins is more likely to have a chilling effect on research into the technique used than to open the floodgates to millions more edited babies | Continue reading
If you want to find your way across the universe, forget using stars or GPS. The light from quasars billions of light years away can guide us and even help here on Earth | Continue reading
He Jiankui has tried to create babies that are resistant to HIV infection. But there are safer ways to protect against the virus than untested gene editing | Continue reading
The area in our solar system within Mercury’s orbit is empty, which may be because solar winds threw all the rocks farther out, where they helped form planets | Continue reading
A study by the UK's Met Office has found that climate change made this year's northern hemisphere summer heatwave around 30 times more likely | Continue reading
The microbiome of a 400-year-old painting includes bacteria and fungi that eat pigments but a treatment with other microbes can protect the painting from damage | Continue reading
A miniature sensor that can be stuck to your skin, clothing or jewellery monitors your UV exposure and lets you know when it’s time to get out of the sun | Continue reading
A fossil so well preserved that its skin is still flexible is revealing much more about the marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs that swam in the sea during the age of dinosaurs | Continue reading
Staff at Google, Amazon and Microsoft are using walkouts, work slowdowns and refusals to build to hold the tech giants to their proclaimed ethics | Continue reading
Genetically modified pig hearts have kept baboons alive for more than 90 days, a threshold that may now allow trials of this type of transplantation in people | Continue reading
The scientist who led an experiment to create gene-edited babies has been criticised for acting unethically towards the couples and infants involved | Continue reading
The UK's 100,000 Genomes Project has hit its target for sequencing the genetic data of people with cancer and rare diseases | Continue reading
The scale of food waste is shocking, with almost 30 per cent of US food ending up in the bin. Firms like Blue Apron and HelloFresh could offer a surprising solution | Continue reading
A woman has successfully given birth after receiving a uterus taken from a dead person. The success could make womb transplants much more widely available | Continue reading
To protect patients we must make it as difficult to gain approval for medical devices as it is for medicines, says Peter Wilmshurst | Continue reading
Two billion people have anaemia – now a smartphone app that analyses photos of their fingernails can help them monitor the condition | Continue reading
It's the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced, but we can keep global warming to within the "safe" boundary of 1.5°C. Here's how we do it | Continue reading
Bouncing around specially tailored waves can turn an entire room into an analogue computer, which could help build an energy-efficient artificial intelligence | Continue reading
Rare Chatham albatross chicks get a room with a view – the adults build towering ground nests up to a metre tall to try to keep their young high and dry | Continue reading
In a reanalysis of all of its data, LIGO spotted gravitational waves from four new pairs of black holes colliding, bringing the total detection count up to 11 | Continue reading
The latest figures show that preventative efforts are working, if only governments are willing to put them into action, says Deborah Gold | Continue reading
The sun has a north pole but no spacecraft has ever photographed it. Now the European Space Agency has cleverly pieced a together picture of it using other images | Continue reading
The sun has a north pole but no spacecraft has ever photographed it. Now the European Space Agency has cleverly pieced a together picture of it using other images | Continue reading
A Soyuz rocket carrying three astronauts to the International Space Station launched successfully, ending a period of uncertainty for human spaceflight | Continue reading
When people in Finland were asked about the morality of visiting a robot brothel most thought it was OK for singles to do it, but not people who were married | Continue reading
A real insider book explains why the saying busy as a bee has honeybees all wrong – and how studying them in the wild could be good news for them and us | Continue reading
The best fantastic novels and comic series of the year mourn a wild past and look with trepidation towards a weird future | Continue reading
The OSIRIS-REx mission is set to arrive at its destination, the asteroid Bennu, which gets dangerously close to Earth and may tell us about the early solar system | Continue reading
From the true nature of time to the world's most extraordinary brains to why you should ditchg social media, Culture picks the best books to give this year | Continue reading
Hair of the dog? Wine before beer? Why everything you know about hangovers, and how to cure them, is wrong – or unproven | Continue reading
Many studies about social media use and health have a fundamental flaw - they use unreliable self-reports about how much people use technology | Continue reading
Orbital Reflector, a giant balloon that will inflate in Earth’s orbit and reflect the sun’s light, is the latest attempt at large-scale art in space. But space art should do more than mimic the stars | Continue reading
Half a billion people who've stayed at Marriott hotels may have had their data exposed, including passport numbers and credit card details | Continue reading
Two French caves contain dozens of prehistoric images of hands that are missing fingers, suggesting people voluntarily had their fingers amputated | Continue reading
Following an enigmatic map and the footsteps of an ill-fated conquistador, archaeologists may have unearthed one of the biggest pre-Columbian settlements in the US | Continue reading
Car tyres embedded with silica and nanogenerators can harvest energy from the tyre rolling while also keeping track of whether the road is in good repair | Continue reading
One species of spider seems to have worked out how to recycle unused eggs into a milk that contains four times the protein of cow’s milk | Continue reading
We thought the first Homo species evolved in East Africa 2.8 million years ago, but stone tools from Algeria suggest our origins may have spanned the continent | Continue reading
One species of spider seems to have worked out how to recycle unused eggs into a milk that contains four times the protein of cow’s milk | Continue reading
The Tibetan Plateau is a tough environment so we thought humans arrived only about 12,000 years ago, but it seems someone was there 40,000 to 30,000 years ago | Continue reading
A gamma ray telescope has revealed that the rate of star formation across the Universe peaked 10 billion years ago and has been going downhill ever since | Continue reading
A gene therapy treatment for Parkinson's blocks faulty brain circuits. This seems to help create alternate neural pathways for movement and eases symptoms | Continue reading
The US is mulling controls on the sharing of AI, but science can't grow in isolation, says Mark Riedl | Continue reading
If you celebrate Christmas, it doesn't have to be a feast of rampant consumerism and devastating gluttony. Read our guide to cleaning up your Yule | Continue reading