With more and more people monitoring their glucose levels in an attempt to boost their health, we take a look at what the evidence says about limiting your blood sugar spikes after eating | Continue reading
A raft of new measures aimed at reducing underage vaping are set to come into law next year | Continue reading
Drone footage filmed off the coast of California shows a 1.5-metre-long, entirely white great white shark pup, probably just hours old – something that has never been seen before | Continue reading
Covering paintings with very thin layers of graphene, or mixing graphene-derived materials into mortars used for repairing historical structures, could protect them from degrading | Continue reading
SLIM was put into hibernation after landing on the moon upside down, but it woke up when sunlight hit its solar panels | Continue reading
Conventional thermodynamics says that heating and cooling are essentially mirror images of each other, but an experiment with a tiny silica sphere suggests otherwise | Continue reading
Conventional thermodynamics says that heating and cooling are essentially mirror images of each other, but an experiment with a tiny silica sphere suggests otherwise | Continue reading
A rubbery patch studded with suction cups that imitate the suckers on octopus limbs can make drugs penetrate the skin without breaking it or causing irritation | Continue reading
A study reconstructing the climate of Italy during the Roman Empire based on marine sediments shows that three pandemics coincided with cooler, drier conditions | Continue reading
A tiny, biohybrid robot moves by contracting lab-grown muscle tissue in its legs – but it needs help to stand up in a water tank and it tops out at just 5.4 millimetres per minute | Continue reading
Engineered cells that make the substances they need to grow could dramatically reduce the cost of cultivating lab-grown meat | Continue reading
After causing an international incident by suggesting that adding salt to your cup of tea will improve it, chemist Michelle Francl says it’s great to see everyone talking about chemistry | Continue reading
Learning to play the piano causes various changes in activity in areas of the brain involved in memory, movement and processing sensory information | Continue reading
Writing words down increases connectivity linked to memory and learning between different areas of the brain, with the same not being true when things are typed out on a computer | Continue reading
A never-before-seen type of star that puffs out enormous clouds challenges our ideas of what happens when giant stars reach the end of their lives | Continue reading
Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) didn’t last long after it landed on the surface of the moon, but it released two rovers – one that hops and one that rolls – that took images on the lunar surface | Continue reading
Observations of the microquasar SS 433 provide clues to how these small black holes accelerate electrons to produce high-energy jets | Continue reading
Rebus puzzles provide wordplay challenges involving both images and text, and they can confound Silicon Valley’s most powerful AI models | Continue reading
Experiments with a robotic dinosaur suggest feathers may have evolved to startle prey into fleeing from hiding places, a strategy used by some modern birds | Continue reading
Experiments with a robotic dinosaur suggest feathers may have evolved to startle prey into fleeing from hiding places, a strategy used by some modern birds | Continue reading
Antechinus males only live for one breeding season, so they give up 3 hours of sleep a night during this short period before dying of exhaustion | Continue reading
Owls are famously good at rotating their heads, but now anatomical findings suggest they really could go a full 360 degrees without injuring themselves | Continue reading
We keep finding pancake-like objects in the solar system and it could be because they form in a certain way – from spinning clouds of pebbles | Continue reading
Three fossils of Pachycormus fish from the dinosaur era feature smaller members of the same species in their guts - perhaps showing how the animals got by when food was scarce | Continue reading
A wearable device that sticks to the skin can constantly measure the size of certain tumours and wirelessly transmit that information to a smartphone | Continue reading
A person wearing a VR headset and haptic feedback gloves can control the iCub 3 robot and experience being somewhere else | Continue reading
People with unusually thin retinas are at greater risk of later developing bronchitis and other conditions, suggesting retinal scans could eventually become a component of routine health screening | Continue reading
Photographer Matjaz Krivic has been charting the effects of lithium mining on locals in the world's largest salt flat in Bolivia since 2016 | Continue reading
From music playlists to what we eat or who we date, we are accidentally outsourcing our cultural tastes and personal desires to homogenising feeds, argues Kyle Chayka in his new book | Continue reading
Returning to university teaching after almost two decades, Annalee Newitz finds they have become the Rip Van Winkle of pedagogy and tries to get to grips with the terrible learning technology | Continue reading
Feedback is intrigued to discover that nominative determinism can also apply to companies, but distressed to learn what this can mean for those purchasing salads | Continue reading
Describing menstrual products using euphemistic language such as "feminine hygiene products" reinforces the trope that menstruation is shameful. It's time to stop, says Jen Gunter | Continue reading
Biochemist Katalin Karikó believed in mRNA's potential, but funders were quiet and she was demoted. Still, she dug in, preparing the world for life-saving covid-19 vaccines, as she writes in her memoir | Continue reading
Dedicating time and money to inquire about aspects of our physiology that appear to serve little purpose might seem a little strange, but it turns out to be a great route to breakthroughs in biology | Continue reading
Tired of your American-style pancakes looking flat and anaemic? Catherine de Lange finds the secret to thick, pillowy perfection | Continue reading
Some urbanites feel like nature-travel shows almost come from another planet, while others worry they encourage harmful tourism. Luckily, Simon Reeve's excellent new series puts conservation to the fore, says Bethan Ackerley | Continue reading
Producing steel generates huge amounts of CO2 emissions. These could be reduced with a technique that repurposes the hazardous red mud generated when refining aluminium | Continue reading
Estimates suggest that there were tens of thousands of pregnancies as a result of rape between July 2022 and January 2024 in US states that effectively have total abortion bans | Continue reading
Four skeletons in a prehistoric burial site in Brazil contain the DNA of bacteria that are closely related to the syphilis bacterium, giving clues as to the infection's origin | Continue reading
Fungi exposed to acoustic stimulation in lab experiments have faster growth rates, suggesting a possible way to speed up composting and restore habitats | Continue reading
A decade ago, a study showed that the US had the lowest life expectancy among high-income countries. Why are things still getting worse, asks Laudan Aron | Continue reading
The world needs more data centres to support internet activity and the AI boom. That could double the associated electricity demand in the next few years | Continue reading
Satellite images have helped to locate four previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins in the Antarctic. One of the colonies has over 5000 members | Continue reading
Growing up at a different temperature seems to transform common prey bacteria into predators, suggesting that bacterial ecology is more fluid than we thought | Continue reading
People with type 2 diabetes who take part in clinical trials may benefit from professional weight loss advice, regular monitoring and moral support, which can be lacking outside of research settings | Continue reading
A camera can recreate how animals see the world through both visible and ultraviolet light | Continue reading
Companies around the world are spreading crushed rocks on farms to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a process called enhanced weathering, but the hard part is measuring how much is stored | Continue reading
We now know that there are at least 45 different blood types and that yours may influence your risk of disease, from malaria to cancer | Continue reading