When a child first does something without being asked, their parents usually celebrate. Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) are having that moment right now. | Continue reading
For the first time, a woman has been awarded the prestigious Abel Prize. Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck of the University of Texas at Austin will receive the annual prize for her tremendous contributions to the field. | Continue reading
Dogs are said to be a human's best friend - but they also provide an environmental conundrum to some of us. | Continue reading
Scientists have just found a new distinction between the brains of the two sexes: age-related changes to the brain occur more slowly in women than in men. | Continue reading
Antarctica is not in a good place. In the space of only decades, the continent has lost trillions of tonnes of ice at alarming rates we can't keep up with, even in places we once thought were safe. | Continue reading
In what researchers describe as the largest study of its kind, scientists have found new evidence of a link between infection with the protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, and schizophrenia. | Continue reading
He Jiankui, the Chinese researcher who drew wide criticism when it emerged that he gene-edited several human babies, told an influential adviser about the work many months before it became public. | Continue reading
In recent years, a growing number of scientific studies have backed an alarming hypothesis: Alzheimer's disease isn't just a disease, it's an infection. | Continue reading
Somewhere in the outer reaches of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune, something wonky is happening. A few objects are orbiting differently from everything else, and we don't know why. | Continue reading
Somewhere in the outer reaches of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune, something wonky is happening. A few objects are orbiting differently from everything else, and we don't know why. | Continue reading
A series of new animations by a NASA scientist show just how zippy – and also how torturously slow – the speed of light can be. | Continue reading
The flowers are listening, according to new research – well, in a sense, at least. | Continue reading
Researchers have been able to coax human breast cancer cells to turn into fat cells in a new proof-of-concept study in mice. | Continue reading
It's been compared to crop circles, or the strange handiwork of aliens. Others say it looks like the Moon, if it somehow materialised in the chilly waters of the Presumpscot River. | Continue reading
Will there be no end to people trying to muck up the night sky? Around this time last year it was a disco ball sent into low-Earth orbit. Now a Russian startup has had the colossally dense idea of sticking beaming billboards up there, to shine advert | Continue reading
You may have witnessed this scene at work, while socializing with friends or over a holiday dinner with extended family: Someone who has very little knowledge in a subject claims to know a lot. That person might even boast about being an expert. | Continue reading
Not everything is knowable. In a world where it seems like artificial intelligence and machine learning can figure out just about anything, that might seem like heresy – but it's true. | Continue reading
We all know the ocean is a terrifying place, harbouring ink-black predators with razor-sharp fangs, grotesque 'alien' lifeforms, and at least one submarine-hating squid, but this hellish ground worm really takes the cake. | Continue reading
Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that has been baffling scientists for decades. It's one of the most enigmatic afflictions out there, and no matter how much research is carried out, the mysteries continue to pile on. | Continue reading
Any species reaching for the stars is bound to have its fingertips singed. Probably more than once. | Continue reading
I teach people how to teach math, and I've been working in this field for 30 years. | Continue reading
If you've ever read anything about the colonies of bacteria that live on and inside you, you'll no doubt have come across the neat little 'fact' that microbial cells outnumber human cells in your body by a ratio of around 10:1. | Continue reading
For many years, quantum computers have only been within the confines of the research lab. | Continue reading
Think your New Year's resolution to hit the gym is daunting? Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wants to change an entire nation's energy policy in 2019. | Continue reading
Last year, Elon Musk's personal Tesla might have gotten all the headlines during SpaceX's historic rocket launch back back in February, but the Falcon Heavy also carried a second, secret payload almost nobody knew about. | Continue reading
Shark populations off the east coast of Australia have been declining over the past 55 years with little sign of recovery, according to research published in the journal Communications Biology. | Continue reading
Antarctica has a new hole. It's more than a kilometre (just under 4,000 feet) deep, barely a hand-span or two in width, and ends in a body of water named Lake Mercer. | Continue reading
Bacteria are slippery little suckers. They evolve rapidly, developing resistance to antibiotics and therefore becoming increasingly difficult to deal with. | Continue reading
We are still in love with vitamins a century after they were discovered, with half the US and UK population taking a supplement. | Continue reading
A gelatinous, single-celled life form has just solved an increasingly complex problem that many researchers use to test algorithms. | Continue reading
According to a straightforward interpretation of general relativity, the Big Bang wasn't the start of 'everything'. | Continue reading
At the very centre of the image above is something incredible - a single, positively-charged strontium atom, suspended in motion by electric fields. | Continue reading
Quantum internet promises ultra-secure, next-generation communications, but is it actually feasible on a global scale? | Continue reading
While the presence of liquid water on Mars remains an ongoing topic of intense interest, we know that there is plenty of water ice adorning the Red Planet - and boy can it ever look amazing, as new images from the European Space Agency's Mars Express | Continue reading
Physicists have come up with what they claim is a mathematical model of a theoretical "time machine" - a box that can move backwards and forwards through time and space. | Continue reading
Not everybody 'gets' art, but one man's failure to comprehend the artwork in front of him was so extreme he literally fell through a black void into limbo. | Continue reading
An ambitious project to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has hit an unexpected snag, just three months after being launched. | Continue reading
Atomic clocks, based on the minute oscillations of atoms, are the most precise timekeeping devices humans have created. | Continue reading
The price of Bitcoin has dropped by 75 percent in the past year, so anyone who invested heavily at the peak will have lost a lot of money. And now there's more bad news for crypto-currency investors to worry about: they may not legally own the digita | Continue reading
There's a forest in Massachusetts that for nearly 30 years has hosted the world's longest running soil-warming experiment, measuring how hotter temperatures impact the tiny life-forms that live in the dirt. | Continue reading
It turns out we humans may have an extra type of thinky bit that isn't found in other primates. A previously unknown brain structure was identified while scientists carefully imaged parts of the human brain for an upcoming atlas on brain anatomy. | Continue reading
Eight thousand light-years from Earth, just below Scorpio, there's a cosmic serpent that's been hiding a secret sting in its tail. In a sinuous curl of glowing dust, astronomers have discovered a binary star system unlike any other in the Milky Way. | Continue reading
If it sounds impossible to you that the surface of our planet is actually older than its inner core, prepare to have you mind blown, because according to new calculations, the inside of Earth is actually 2.5 years younger than the outside. | Continue reading
Dogs, cats, or goldfish probably can't have conversations with each other about times long gone by – it's a feature we've thought was pretty much exclusive to humans. | Continue reading
The first components of the International Space Station (ISS) launched into space more than 20 years ago, and it's been continuously occupied for 18. | Continue reading