The fossil record tells us extinctions happen all the time. The question is what part we play – and whether we could ever bring back creatures like the dinosaurs | Continue reading
If only the fittest survive, why do good deeds for no return? The enduring mystery of altruism goes to the heart of how evolution does – and doesn't – work | Continue reading
A common misconception is that evolution naturally selects for biological complexity, eventually creating advanced organisms like us. That couldn't be further from the truth | Continue reading
Schrödinger's dead-and-alive cat embodies the uncertainty of the quantum world. But whether parallel realities truly exist is a question less of science than belief | Continue reading
Our increased reliance on the internet and smart tech means we are watched more than ever before. Is that something to fight – or is our concept of privacy just outdated? | Continue reading
Human attempts to define intelligence are largely motivated by a desire to prove we have more of it – but a look at the world around us suggests a different story | Continue reading
Are you a human, or a human-Neanderthal hybrid? The concept of the species, one of the most basic in biology, may not be as well-defined as we think | Continue reading
It certainly wasn’t big, and probably didn’t bang – and the surprises in the conventional story of the universe's origins don’t end there | Continue reading
Are you a human, or a human-Neanderthal hybrid? The concept of the species, one of the most basic in biology, may not be as well-defined as we think | Continue reading
Most of us are convinced that we're coherent individuals who are continuous in time. There's just one problem with this sense of self – it can’t exist | Continue reading
Physicists are finally getting their heads round what information truly is – and using it to gain new insights into life, the universe and, well… everything | Continue reading
Dark energy dominates the universe, and could lead it to a cold, bleak end. But that's not to say we have much clue what it is or how it works | Continue reading
Predators are a problem for Trinidad’s killifish: in streams where the problem is worst the killifish grow more brain cells, perhaps to help evade the hunters | Continue reading
A phenomenon called shifting baseline syndrome means we easily forget how much more wildlife there used to be – and it may hamper conservation campaigns | Continue reading
It took billions of years for Earth’s air to grow rich in oxygen, but it may have been destined to do so once photosynthetic bacteria began pumping out the gas | Continue reading
The Greenland ice sheet lost 3.8 trillion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2018, leading to sea level rise that contributes to coastal flooding during storms | Continue reading
One of the world’s biggest genealogy websites has been bought by a company that provides law enforcement agencies with genomic sequencing technology for forensic DNA work | Continue reading
The buried town of Beta Samati in Ethiopia was once part of the Empire of Aksum, which dominated east Africa for centuries and traded with the Roman Empire | Continue reading
The buried town of Beta Samati in Ethiopia was once part of the Empire of Aksum, which dominated east Africa for centuries and traded with the Roman Empire | Continue reading
Minuscule dust particles can clump together to form entire planets, and they seem to require help from static electricity so they don’t bounce off one another | Continue reading
A 3D-printed bunny contains tiny glass beads in which there are DNA-encoded instructions to replicate the rabbit, and they can still be read after nine months | Continue reading
Titan’s lakes, seas and atmosphere are full of methane, and a simulation has revealed that it might come from an underground reservoir spanning the whole moon | Continue reading
Machine-learning algorithms are being used to tackle the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, one of the fiendishly difficult Millennium Prize Problems | Continue reading
A volcanic island in New Zealand has erupted, killing at least five people with dozens more missing | Continue reading
Silicon Valley, HBO's hit series about the tech industry, has real laugh-out loud moments. But it lets the bosses off lightly when it tries to skewer their dubious moments, says Chelsea Whyte in her latest TV column | Continue reading
The English founded Jamestown, Virginia in the 17th century to search for gold. They didn’t find much, but that wasn’t for lack of effort or scientific skill | Continue reading
The world’s oceans have lost 2 per cent of their oxygen on average over the last 50 years, alarming scientists who warn that the trend will impact fisheries | Continue reading
Astronomers are about to get their best opportunity to observe the interstellar comet Borisov as it reaches its closest point to Earth and the sun on 8 December | Continue reading
Two pig-monkey chimeras were born in China but died within a week. This is the first time live pigs have been created that contain some primate cells | Continue reading
Two pig-monkey chimeras were born in China but died within a week. This is the first time live pigs have been created that contain some primate cells | Continue reading
A new record has been set for the largest encryption key ever broken, but there is little threat to online data for now | Continue reading
Samoan government employees have stopped work to administer measles vaccines in an attempt to stop an outbreak of the deadly disease sweeping the island nation | Continue reading
White dwarfs are burnt out stars that can explode into supernovae, and this process might be kicked off by a black hole made of dark matter in the heart of the star | Continue reading
A review of evidence from around the world shows that reducing air pollution in homes, cities or countries has a dramatic effect on health almost immediately | Continue reading
There is real concern over how Chinese video-sharing app TikTok handles privacy. But many of the issues are the same for Silicon Valley apps too | Continue reading
Newly discovered mammal fossils reveal the crucial evolutionary step when the bones for hearing and chewing finally separated | Continue reading
The slaughter of half of China’s pigs due to the African swine fever virus raging across Asia and Europe has helped drive world food prices to a two year high | Continue reading
There is real concern over how Chinese video-sharing app TikTok handles privacy. But many of the issues are the same for Silicon Valley apps too | Continue reading
For the first time plants have been recorded making sounds when stressed. The sounds differed when they were injured or thirsty, a finding that could help farmers | Continue reading
An under-threat flagship science project that monitors an ocean current crucial to weather on both sides of the Atlantic has been given a reprieve after funding was secured for its short-term future | Continue reading
We thought NASA was just monitoring space junk for the US government, but it turns out it has been selling an orbital warning service to select customers | Continue reading
We thought NASA was just monitoring space junk for the US government, but it turns out it has been selling an orbital warning service to select customers | Continue reading
A single gene controls how our faces develop when we are young and offers evidence that humans have evolved to be more domesticated in a similar way to dogs | Continue reading
A once-a-month oral contraceptive capsule that sits in the stomach for weeks has passed its first test in pigs | Continue reading
A giant planet almost as big as Jupiter has been found orbiting a white dwarf, which is the remnants of an exploded star | Continue reading
The Parker Solar Probe has got closer to the sun than any other craft, revealing where the solar wind comes from and how strange magnetic switchbacks speed it up | Continue reading
A productivity-driven funding culture has allowed sloppy science to flourish – but now some researchers are fighting back, says Clare Wilson | Continue reading
From domestic cats’ ecocide of small animals to the greenhouse gases they emit, owning a pet is an environmental vice we must confront, writes Graham Lawton | Continue reading