Using four telescopes linked together, astronomers have captured an astonishing image of a huge star more than 160,000 light years away | Continue reading
Endangered Ethiopian wolves feed on the nectar of red hot poker plants, and may transport pollen from flower to flower as they do so | Continue reading
Space-time may not be continuous but instead made up of many discrete bits – and we may be able to see their effects near the edges of unusually bright black holes | Continue reading
A flying robot uses its bird-like tail to maintain stability in flight – a technique that could enable more aerodynamic aircraft designs that use less fuel | Continue reading
By 2050, 70 per cent of the world's population will live in urban centres - that's just one reason why mayors will be essential to addressing the climate crisis, making vital adaptations to cities to make them more bearable in a warming world | Continue reading
In Adam Roberts's Lake of Darkness, two spaceships meet to study a black hole. Their research comes to an abrupt halt, however, when crew members start dying horribly, says Emily H. Wilson | Continue reading
Feedback is in awe of the authors of a new study in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, and how they handled requests from peer reviewers | Continue reading
When I moved back to York, UK, I was shocked by its garbage system, with limited recycling and no composting. But a bit of digging showed its brilliance, says Graham Lawton | Continue reading
How to Feed the World, Vaclav Smil's "big numbers" book about future food supply, fails to address the impact of climate change | Continue reading
A recent scandal over food hygiene ratings shows how deception destroys trust within society. We need to fight back, says Jonathan R. Goodman | Continue reading
Using GPT-4o, the model behind ChatGPT, researchers have replicated the personality and behaviour of more than 1000 people, in an effort to create an alternative to focus groups and polling | Continue reading
A large planet has been spotted orbiting a dwarf star that is just 3 million years old, offering possible clues to how the worlds in our solar system came into being | Continue reading
IBM has bet big on a modular approach to building quantum computers, and now it has successfully linked two quantum chips together to operate as a single device, a key step towards that goal | Continue reading
Quantum computers could get a boost from artificial intelligence, thanks to a model created by Google DeepMind that cleans up quantum errors | Continue reading
Unbearable heat in China’s megacities reveals the future many of us face, but also suggests ways we can adapt | Continue reading
Many restaurants in countries such as England and the US now print calories on their menus, but some researchers question whether this is really tackling their obesity problem | Continue reading
The best pictures we have of the sun yet have been delivered thanks to the Solar Orbiter spacecraft | Continue reading
The effects of being in space can worsen an astronaut's working memory, processing speed and attention - which could be a problem for future missions | Continue reading
Analysis of millions of galaxies upholds Albert Einstein’s ideas about gravity and also offers tantalising new hints of how dark energy may have evolved | Continue reading
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing for the sixth test flight of Starship, the world's most powerful rocket. It aims to conduct the launch at 4pm Central Time (10pm UK). Here’s everything we know so far | Continue reading
The vast computational power of the El Capitan supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California will be used to support the US nuclear deterrent | Continue reading
Tiny, solid windows in the shells of heart cockles let in light for the photosynthetic algae inside them – and they could show us how to make better fibre-optic cables | Continue reading
A cataclysmic quantum fluctuation could wipe out everything at any moment. The fact that we’re still here is revealing hidden cosmic realities | Continue reading
The largest number of logical qubits has been linked through quantum entanglement, which is a key step towards quantum computers that can detect and correct errors | Continue reading
Nearly 20 million people have joined Bluesky, a social network that gives you fine-grained control over what you see and who you interact with. I think it is the future of social media, says Chris Stokel-Walker | Continue reading
Four southern giant hornets have been identified in northern Spain, leading to concerns that the species could harm native insects if it becomes widespread | Continue reading
Several populations of Mexican tetra fish that live in darkness have independently evolved to need hardly any sleep, but the reason why is a mystery | Continue reading
Most mathematicians have been reluctant to start working with artificial intelligence, but a new tool developed by researchers at Meta may change that | Continue reading
A supercomputer simulation of iron and carbon atoms in Earth’s inner core may explain how a molten ball at the centre of our planet froze solid | Continue reading
The weird thermodynamics found in time crystals could be harnessed to store energy in a quantum battery-like device | Continue reading
Changes to the structure of DNA within fat cells may be why it is often so hard to keep weight off after you have lost it | Continue reading
Leading researchers warn that relying on "passive" carbon sinks such as forests to absorb ongoing carbon emissions will doom the world to continued warming | Continue reading
A study modelling the impact of melting ice suggests scientists have underestimated the risk that an important ocean current will shut down and cause climate chaos | Continue reading
The oral microbiome is increasingly being linked to head and neck cancer, but we don't yet understand its exact role | Continue reading
Attempts to prevent Australian children from accessing social media are likely to fail, and could do more harm than good | Continue reading
Letting AI models communicate with each other in their internal mathematical language, rather than translating back and forth to English, could accelerate their task-solving abilities | Continue reading
Governments and companies almost never take action when satellites alert them about large methane leaks coming from oil and gas infrastructure | Continue reading
Water levels in the Caspian Sea are set to fall dramatically as the climate gets hotter, posing a major threat to economic activity and ecosystems in the region | Continue reading
A genetic flaw dooms half of all crested newts to die before they hatch – now we know how this baffling evolutionary quirk came about | Continue reading
Two massive galaxies are bending light from the same distant quasar, creating a so-called Einstein zigzag lens that could help astronomers pin down how quickly the universe is expanding | Continue reading
It has been 50 years since archaeologists discovered Lucy, perhaps the most famous ancient hominin ever found. But the scientists who have studied her say that this fossil gave us a misleading image of the nature of her species | Continue reading
A classic study found that people can fail to notice a gorilla when they are focusing on something else, but new experiments suggest this "inattentional blindness" might not tell the whole story | Continue reading
Popular semaglutide-based drugs used for weight loss may reduce chronic and acute pain, which could make them a promising alternative to opioids | Continue reading
Satellite images reveal that when conditions are right, the pollution from industrial hotspots can cause snow to fall downwind and punch holes in clouds | Continue reading
The Proba-3 mission consists of two spacecraft that will fly in close formation to study the sun, with the shadow of one creating an artificial solar eclipse from the perspective of the other | Continue reading
Readers give higher ratings to AI-generated poetry than the works of poets such as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson – perhaps because they often have more straightforward themes and simpler structure | Continue reading
With the help of a ruby cube and two laser beams, researchers made one ray of light cast a shadow when illuminated by the other | Continue reading
Driverless cars can now do doughnuts and drift like stunt drivers, skidding sideways around corners while maintaining control, which might help the cars recover from dangerous situations | Continue reading