The Draconid meteor shower is happening between 6 and 10 October, peaking on 9 October, and you should be able to see it if you are in the northern hemisphere | Continue reading
A robotic gripper inspired by a patent from 1913 consists of a nested arrangement of pivoting joints that can wrap around odd shapes using a single motor | Continue reading
The global average air temperature smashed the September average by half a degree Celsius, leading to predictions that 2023 will surpass 2016 as the hottest year ever recorded | Continue reading
Project Kuiper is Amazon's answer to SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service, and the first prototype spacecraft are due to launch on 6 October | Continue reading
This year could have been the beginning of the end for emissions from generating electricity, were it not for a drought that saw a fall in hydropower generation | Continue reading
Two of three genes that affect your likelihood of being vegetarianism are involved in fat metabolism, suggesting that they may affect people's ability to tolerate a diet without animal fats | Continue reading
Prehistoric people endured frigid and dry conditions in the highlands of central Spain during the coldest part of the last glacial period | Continue reading
Common hippos can't move their mouths side to side to grind their food, while pgymy hippos can only partly do this motion | Continue reading
Chicken changes colour when it is safely cooked, right? Not always – and clear juices can’t be relied on either, says Sam Wong | Continue reading
Fun “facts” about the microbiome have become common knowledge, but even if we have been getting these wrong, the truth about the bacteria, viruses and fungi that live in our gut is worth exploring | Continue reading
Anti-obesity efforts are so intertwined with body-shaming attitudes that they actively harm health and well-being, says Becca Muir | Continue reading
Scientific progress has made all sorts of families possible. But as a thought-provoking new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK, shows, it hasn't been a pain-free shift | Continue reading
A reader informs Feedback about the Black Hole Lane near their home, but adds that they have yet to reach the event horizon | Continue reading
The world has happily embraced large language models such as ChatGPT, but even researchers working in AI don't fully understand the systems they work on, finds Alex Wilkins | Continue reading
A scary future looms if we fail to protect the freedom of being anonymous in public places, says Kashmir Hill's new book | Continue reading
Three decades in the making, JWST is one of the most ambitious space projects ever embarked on. These photographs, from a new book, Inside the Star Factory, show how it was developed | Continue reading
Set during a futuristic war between humans and artificial intelligence, The Creator is nothing if not spectacular. Shame it is cobbled together from the tropes of other science fiction movies, says Simon Ings | Continue reading
Today’s test of the US national alert system on mobile phones is intended to offer opportunities to learn and prepare for emergencies, but tests in the past have sparked conspiracy theories | Continue reading
Researchers built tiny robots that can switch between two different kinds of flight, one involving unusually fast wing-flapping, to better understand insect evolution | Continue reading
China is both the world’s biggest carbon emitter and the largest producer of clean energy tech. Its choices in navigating this paradoxical role may determine the future of the entire planet | Continue reading
Bertrand Bonello’s latest movie, The Beast, invites viewers to grapple with what dependency on technology is doing to us – and asks if AI could even kill off our humanity | Continue reading
The satellite internet services provided by SpaceX Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb or Amazon Kuiper will come with a carbon footprint much higher than that associated with land-based alternatives | Continue reading
The tiny crystals, only a few nanometres in size, have applications in computing, lasers and microscopy | Continue reading
The arrival of the eucalyptus snout beetle threatens the country’s eucalyptus trees – but they themselves are an invasive threat to local species | Continue reading
In a study of more than 220,000 people, 12 genetic variants were strongly associated with hip pain, a discovery that could improve treatments | Continue reading
Brown bears in Katmai National Park can eat up to 160,000 calories a day to prepare for winter, but how do they know it's feasting time? | Continue reading
While research on marijuana has surged in the last 20 years, our understanding of the drug is decades behind that of other substances, like tobacco and alcohol | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence has generated recognisable images of things like shoes and T-shirts on a small quantum computer. They aren’t great, but the method could scale up to more powerful machines | Continue reading
The low-pitched sound of purring is unusual for an animal with short vocal folds, but cats have other structures in their larynx that enable their contented rumbling | Continue reading
A sophisticated algorithm enables a robotic hand to rotate Rubik’s cubes and other objects in three axes, with potential applications on automated manufacturing lines | Continue reading
The microbes living on and in you can change your mood, your mind and your health - challenging our ideas about human nature | Continue reading
We are told our gut microbiomes are set from birth with babies born by C-section missing out, but factors later in life seem to be just as important | Continue reading
The microbiome has been linked to diseases including Alzheimer's, diabetes, chronic fatigue syndrome and more - which could lead to new treatments | Continue reading
From diet, to stress, sleep and your social life, there are plenty of ways to keep the microbiome working and boost health at any age | Continue reading
We used to think the microbiome was mainly formed when we were babies but who you choose to live with later in life will shape the inhabitants of your gut | Continue reading
From probiotics to faecal transplants, here's what you need to know about products and remedies that promise to restore the health of your gut microbes | Continue reading
A second vaccine against the mosquito-borne disease should be available from next year, adding to the first that was launched in 2019 | Continue reading
Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier figured out how to generate attosecond pulses of light, which last a billionth of a billionth of a second and can be used to make movies of electrons - a find that has won them the 2023 Nobel prize in physics | Continue reading
Physicists have used the famous particle smasher to investigate the strange phenomena of quantum entanglement at far higher energies than ever before | Continue reading
For a few days each month, as the full moon sweeps through the stretched-out tail of Earth’s magnetic field, high-energy electrons seem to be helping form water molecules on the lunar surface | Continue reading
We know less about the strength of the strong force than of any of the other fundamental forces of nature, but researchers at CERN have now made the most precise measurement of it ever | Continue reading
Observations collected from telescopes around the world confirm that the communications satellite BlueWalker 3 outshines all but seven stars, posing huge problems for astronomy | Continue reading
North America will see a hybrid solar eclipse on 14 October and a total eclipse in April 2024. Scientists are preparing to use these spectacles to study our star's mysterious corona | Continue reading
Breeding beetles belonging to dozens of species are attracted to the piles of food waste left behind by raiding army ants | Continue reading
This year has seen an unprecedented number of Russian oil tankers in Arctic waters, increasing the risk of oil spills that could impact human communities and marine wildlife | Continue reading
From an authorised sequel to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to a collection of newly discovered short stories from the late Terry Pratchett, there is a mountain of brilliant science fiction to get through this month | Continue reading
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine | Continue reading
Some of the components in quantum computers must be reset between operations, slowing down calculations, but tiny refrigerators could speed things up | Continue reading