Jezero crater on Mars is thought to have once had a river flowing along its rim and could hold signs of ancient life | Continue reading
A cache of sophisticated stone tools from a cave in China date back 170,000 years – perhaps a sign that our species arrived in East Asia earlier than we thought | Continue reading
Pre-eclampsia affects up to 10 per cent of pregnancies and can have serious complications. A single injection may one day be enough to treat the condition | Continue reading
A vast network of termite tunnels and 2.5-metre-tall mounds that covers 230,000 square kilometres may be the biggest engineered structure built by an insect | Continue reading
Think 3D printing is all about obscure plastic widgets? Think again – bioprinting pioneer Jennifer Lewis has a plan to make living, breathing human organs | Continue reading
Artists play cat and mouse with face-recognition software at a South Korean exhibition in the battle to retain a division between humanity and machines | Continue reading
Turning off phone notifications for 24 hours amped anxiety, but raised productivity. Two years on, the experience is still helping people call the shots | Continue reading
A new genetic test that enables people having IVF to screen out embryos likely to have a low IQ or high disease risk could soon become available in the US | Continue reading
If you want to save Earth, argues a new book, quit sitting around in the present hoping for the best and learn to think really long term, like a geologist | Continue reading
Scientists from around the world have unanimously voted for a new definition of the kilogram – one based on fundamental constants instead of “Le Grand K” | Continue reading
Water contaminated with heavy metals, such as lead, could be cleaned up by thousands of microbots built from mushroom spores | Continue reading
The Gaia satellite has spotted a ghost galaxy with a lower surface brightness than any stellar system we’ve ever seen – but the discovery is being questioned | Continue reading
Moving backwards - or simply imagining doing it - can be enough to improve scores on memory tests, but we don't know why | Continue reading
Getting up early on weekdays and sleeping in on weekends to compensate may cause period pain by disrupting the circadian rhythms that control hormone cycles | Continue reading
This internet tracker can follow your browsing for months even if you use ad blockers, by measuring variations in the quartz crystals in your device's clock | Continue reading
The Union of Concerned Scientists has overturned its longstanding opposition to nuclear power. Other green groups should follow suit, says Mark Lynas | Continue reading
Genetics pioneer George Church's new company says it will sequence your genome for free and secure it on a blockchain, so that you can choose who uses your data | Continue reading
People with genes that make them taste caffeine more strongly tend to be coffee-drinkers, while tea-drinkers have genetic aversions to strongly bitter tastes | Continue reading
From unconscious biases to advertising, the idea we can think fast or slow is influential, but it may be mistaken. Here’s how to think better | Continue reading
Crude proteins made of short chains of amino acids can form life-like “protocells” that host biological processes – hinting that life began with proteins | Continue reading
As tests that screen embryos for complex traits become available, it's time to decide how to use these ethically – and where to draw the line | Continue reading
A lab-on-a-chip that fits inside a smartphone is set to change our relationship with food and the chemicals we use to make it | Continue reading
Antibiotic resistance has spread around the world - so much so that even penguins living near Antarctic research bases have resistant bacteria in their gut | Continue reading
A new genetic test that enables people having IVF to screen out embryos likely to have a low IQ or high disease risk could soon become available in the US | Continue reading
Radar surveys have revealed a crater left when a kilometre-wide asteroid hit Greenland – and the impact could explain a climate mystery | Continue reading
Radar surveys have revealed a crater left when a kilometre-wide asteroid hit Greenland – and the impact could explain a climate mystery | Continue reading
A climate change denier is no longer to head House science committee, but Washington state voters reject carbon tax and Arizona blocks renewable energy boost | Continue reading
After years of searching, a planet several times larger than Earth has been discovered orbiting Barnard’s star – the closest star to Earth after the Alpha Centauri system | Continue reading
Tall buildings in Houston made hurricane Harvey dump more rain on the region, before the water ran straight off the city's hard surfaces causing epic flooding | Continue reading
Fears of an artificial intelligence apocalypse make the news, but it's AI-fuelled inequality we should worry about, says Andrew Simms | Continue reading
Household heating systems are huge sources of carbon emissions, but many countries are showing how existing technologies can fix the problem | Continue reading
Two new studies reveal recent evolutionary changes in Europe and East Asia, suggesting that modern living can change our immune systems and metabolism | Continue reading
The most ambitious experiments yet show that the quantum weirdness Einstein famously hated rules the roost – not just here, but across the entire universe | Continue reading
A lasting desire to find differences in how male and female brains work serves to affirm gender stereotypes, not explain them, says Dean Burnett | Continue reading
Months of observations have shown that the strange explosion in space called “the Cow” gets extra power from within, making it a new type of celestial event | Continue reading
A defence firm has unveiled a prototype quantum radar. If it works, it could use entangled protons to locate stealth aircraft that normally avoid detection | Continue reading
A lost language encoded in intricate cords is finally revealing its secrets – and it could upend what we know about Incan history and culture | Continue reading
The Marvel comics legend has died aged 95. The creative force behind Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Avengers, Thor, X-Men and many more, Lee's influence on culture was huge - but let's not overlook his impact on our humanity | Continue reading
Having a sense of what you want to do with your life can help you live longer, slash your risk of disease and improve your sex life – and it’s easy to do | Continue reading
Even if governments step up action on energy, fossil fuel consumption will keep growing for at least another 20 years according to a major new report | Continue reading
Jamaica was once home to a sloth-like monkey – now we know it was a strange descendant of South America’s titi monkeys that adapted to island life | Continue reading
Dickinsonia lived about 560 million years ago and may have been the first animal – but it seems to have inflated its body in a way no animals do today | Continue reading
Next to Pluto’s heart-shaped plains are strange rolling hills unlike anything we’ve seen on Earth, and they may be left over from receding ancient glaciers | Continue reading
Pavel Fomenko patrols the icy and dangerous forests of Russia’s far east to protect its big cats. But the worst happened when he least expected it | Continue reading
Billions of tiny sacs filled with weapons and warning signals to other cells are released into the lining of our noses when dangerous bacteria are detected | Continue reading
An unusual venue stages an intriguing play about Darwin's Beagle days as London's Natural History Museum turns theatrical–with superb puppets as exotic wildlife | Continue reading
After sensors alerted a researcher to Lyme disease symptoms he was unaware he had, his team have shown that smartwatches can tell if a wearer is getting ill | Continue reading
Exaggerated health claims, corporate funding, unpublished negative results: a new book exposes the way the US food industry hijacks science and fights for answers | Continue reading