A network that connects quantum devices and a central server that spans Hefei, China can allow multiple secure quantum chats at once | Continue reading
From ketamine in a London kitchen to wachuma in the Colombian Amazon, self-described "douchey forty-nine-year-old psychedelic virgin" and neuropsychologist Andy Mitchell hopes his trips will teach us more about the drugs | Continue reading
A combination of keen senses and quick reflexes may help mosquitoes avoid a sticky end by riding the pressure wave generated as a swatter sweeps through the air | Continue reading
Between 2010 and 2021, the proportion of drug overdose deaths in the US involving a combination of fentanyl and a stimulant such as cocaine or methamphetamine skyrocketed | Continue reading
Male frogs will sometimes try to mate with turtles or inanimate objects, and now there is evidence that the behaviour began deep in prehistory with the first frogs | Continue reading
A streamlined version of Moderna’s vaccine that targets only key parts of the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is being trialled in humans | Continue reading
To stay within safe planetary boundaries, humans should only use around 10 per cent of the biomass produced each year by plants on land, but we are currently way above that level | Continue reading
Animal footprints carved into rock thousands of years ago depict over 40 species, a trio of trackers has determined | Continue reading
With just a few weeks to go, now is the time to grab your tickets to the world’s greatest festival of ideas, says Emily Wilson | Continue reading
Time scales in my favourite soap opera Emmerdale make no sense, but maybe this helps avid fans to normalise the concept of time dilation, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein | Continue reading
How powerful is artificial intelligence? Where has it sprung from? Mustafa Suleyman's The Coming Wave is one of four disquieting books which set out to explore AI's hold on the world | Continue reading
Sharing information about children before they are born, like I did when I posted my daughter's ultrasound scan, may affect a child's future on multiple levels, says psychologist Elaine Kasket | Continue reading
Mycologists Danny Newman and Roo Vandegrift spent more than a decade scouting for fungi in the threatened Los Cedros reserve in Ecuador. See some of their finds here | Continue reading
With more of us turning to cannabis and its compounds for medical reasons than ever before, we need solid research to tell us what it really does to the body and mind | Continue reading
The protagonist of John Scalzi's excellent new sci-fi novel is trying to find his way out of existential misery. So is the hero of Lavie Tidhar's The Circumference of the World. But at their hearts, both books are setting out to explore what on earth we are doing here, finds Sall … | Continue reading
You can currently see Cygnus and its lovely stars, including stunning double star Albireo, from almost anywhere in the world, says Abigail Beall | Continue reading
The Karman Space Programme, set up by students at Imperial College London, will attempt to launch its Aurora rocket to an altitude of 100 kilometres, the generally accepted boundary of space | Continue reading
Most adhesives are made from fossil fuels and take thousands of years to biodegrade, but a new alternative derived from soya plants bonds metal, wood and synthetic surfaces just as strongly | Continue reading
Mixing and matching various strands of DNA can create versatile biological computer circuits that can take the square roots of numbers or solve quadratic equations | Continue reading
Claims about the health benefits of cannabidiol have outpaced credible research, but CBD does show some real promise | Continue reading
Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope suggest supermassive black holes from the early universe are more massive in relation to their galaxies compared with those near us | Continue reading
Researchers and governments are finally battling back against the deluge of false information online, just as artificial intelligence threatens to supercharge the problem | Continue reading
Pluto officially lost its planethood in 2006, and this episode of Dead Planets Society is all about bringing it back by making it bigger, faster and better than ever | Continue reading
In the past five years, there have been almost 100 cases of the UK's Environment Agency deploying emergency oxygen to stop fish in English rivers from dying | Continue reading
Renewable energy development is transforming the US countryside. It could be a chance to restore the iconic prairies if rural opposition can be overcome | Continue reading
Comet Nishimura, which was discovered just a month ago, is about to make its closest approach to the sun, giving people in the northern hemisphere a great chance of a sighting | Continue reading
A review of the Mental Health First Aid programme, which trains members of the public to support people with conditions like depression, has found no good evidence of it actually improving mental health | Continue reading
Toilets that collect health data could be hacked to reveal extremely sensitive information and should be regulated as medical devices, say security experts | Continue reading
The development of cosmic structure – the huge strands of galaxies and caverns of emptiness that make up our universe – seems to be slowing down more than expected. That could mean there is something wrong with our understanding of the universe | Continue reading
An analysis of more than 200,000 people found that living a healthy lifestyle that includes things like getting enough sleep, regularly exercising and eating a healthy diet is linked to a 57 per cent lower risk of developing depression compared with people who didn’t do this | Continue reading
Already a serious invasive species in the US and Australia, red imported fire ant nests have now been found in Sicily, Italy, and they could spread to other parts of Europe | Continue reading
Devices in which heat is a necessary part of the computation process rather than a nuisance could lead to more energy-efficient machines | Continue reading
Sleep-tracker data from 35 countries shows that people in Western countries tend to have longer lie-ins at the weekend than people in Asia, and they go to bed earlier | Continue reading
Sleep-tracker data from 35 countries shows that people in Western countries tend to have longer lie-ins at the weekend than people in Asia, and they go to bed earlier | Continue reading
Originally dreamed up by Dominic Cummings, the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has been tasked with a high-risk, high-reward approach to research funding | Continue reading
Between 1.5 and 2°C of global warming will lead to heatwaves so extreme that healthy people can't survive outdoors for long, in areas where people aren't used to extreme heat | Continue reading
Children between the ages of 4 months and 2 years seem more likely to have antibodies that attack insulin-producing cells, a feature of type 1 diabetes, if they have had covid-19, which may show how viral infections can lead to this type of diabetes | Continue reading
The success of the Indian Space Research Organisation mission to the moon places India as a capable up-and-comer in the space industry, and may inspire other nations with relatively new space agencies to follow suit | Continue reading
Until recently, working out how three objects can stably orbit each other was nearly impossible, but now mathematicians have found a record number of solutions | Continue reading
Cannabis originated in East Asia but can now be found growing on every continent except Antarctica – thanks to human trade and cultivation | Continue reading
The source of ochre minerals used by Stone Age humans in an Ethiopian cave changed over a 4500-year period, although it is unclear why | Continue reading
Fossils from a 25-million-year-old koala that may have weighed just 2.6 kilograms might help us understand how early marsupials diversified | Continue reading
Historically, researchers believed that quantum properties disappear at the scale of biology, but there is increasing evidence that this isn't the full story, says physicist Clarice Aiello | Continue reading
The destruction of telecommunications cables during the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano in 2022 shows that underwater debris currents can travel at 122 kilometres per hour | Continue reading
The price of carbon capture technology for power plants could be slashed using a design that relies on the reaction between CO2 in flue gas and a fine mist of electrically charged particles | Continue reading
Early kidney structures made of mostly human cells have been grown in pig embryos for up to 28 days as part of efforts to grow human organs in other animals for transplants | Continue reading
African Parks, a conservation group, has acquired a huge collection of southern white rhinos from a private estate in South Africa and plans to release them into the wild | Continue reading
For 75 years, the US Midwest has experienced unexpectedly cool summer temperatures – the “warming hole” could be due in part to intensive agriculture | Continue reading