The flickering colors of a sleeping octopus seem to indicate something akin to an REM sleep state, scientists have found. | Continue reading
The European Space Agency (ESA) has just released the most accurate and detailed map of the Milky Way ever, charting the position in space of more than 1.1 billion stars in our galaxy. | Continue reading
It's 2021, and we finally don't have to worry quite so much about our spacecraft getting lost in interstellar space. | Continue reading
Although the Universe is a large place, and all the stuff in it may seem just flung everywhere higgledy-piggledy, there's rather more structure than we can see. | Continue reading
The origin and identity of a massive space object that careened past Earth in 2017 have remained a mystery ever since. | Continue reading
The menagerie of bacterial and fungal species living among us is ever growing - and this is no exception in low-gravity environments, such as the International Space Station (ISS). | Continue reading
Russian scientists on Saturday launched one of the world's biggest underwater space telescopes to peer deep into the Universe from the pristine waters of Lake Baikal. | Continue reading
For decades, we've dreamed of visiting other star systems. There's just one problem – they're so far away, with conventional spaceflight it would take tens of thousands of years to reach even the closest one. | Continue reading
An international team of scientists has announced the discovery of an extraordinary fossilized nest in China, preserving at least eight separate dinosaurs from 70 million years ago. | Continue reading
Oxygen is life to animals like us. But for many species of microbe, the smallest whiff of the highly reactive element puts their delicate chemical machinery at risk of rusting up. | Continue reading
A peculiar new paper, published in a little-known scientific journal, has the tabloids stirred up about the possibility of life on Mars. | Continue reading
Indoor cannabis production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and the environmental effects vary significantly depending on where it is being grown, according to our new study. | Continue reading
Regeneration is a fairly widespread ability in the animal kingdom - for increasing long-term survival chances, you simply can't beat the option to regrow entire limbs or organs. But these two species of sacoglossan sea slug take it to the extreme. | Continue reading
An important new study suggests octopuses are likely to feel and respond to pain in a similar way to mammals - the first strong evidence for this capacity in any invertebrate. | Continue reading
Social distancing to stop the spread of COVID-19 might feel unnatural to us humans, but other animals intuitively do something similar, without the need for rules or regulations to keep them in line. | Continue reading
More than 17,000 earthquakes have been recorded in the south-west of Iceland, in the Reykjanes Peninsula, during the past week. | Continue reading
The Mars rover Perseverance has successfully conducted its first test drive on the Red Planet, the US space agency NASA said Friday. | Continue reading
This month is a time to celebrate. CERN has just announced the discovery of four brand new particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. | Continue reading
While most of us take the ground beneath our feet for granted, written within its complex layers, like pages of a book, is Earth's history. Our history. | Continue reading
A new test of cephalopod smarts has reinforced how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence. | Continue reading
For the first time, physicists have captured an enigmatic state of matter on video. | Continue reading
Having dominated the planet's surface for hundreds of millions of years, dinosaur diversity came to a dramatic conclusion some 66 million years ago at the hot end of an asteroid impact with what is today Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. | Continue reading
We all want our cats to live forever (except when they’re waking us up at 6am for biscuits), and while feline immortality is still out of our grasp, it’s not that unusual for cats to live into their 20s - a solid effort for such little guys. | Continue reading
In total, there are thousands of them – a giant landscape of strange, hollowed jars, carved from ancient stone. Some have lids. Most are open to the sky. | Continue reading
Spinal cord injuries are sustained by hundreds of thousands of people every year, with many patients experiencing a significant and often permanent loss of movement and physical sensation resulting from nerve damage. | Continue reading
Russia said Saturday that its scientists had detected the world's first case of transmission of the H5N8 strain of avian flu from birds to humans and had alerted the World Health Organization. | Continue reading
Scientists have identified a new phenomenon they describe as "interactive dreaming", where people experiencing deep sleep and lucid dreams are able to follow instructions, answer simple yes-or-no questions, and even solve basic mathematics problems. | Continue reading
Now that the bin-fire that was 2020 is in our rear view mirror, social media is making a return to serious discussions that truly matter. Like how many colors a thing has. Again. | Continue reading
After tracing the origins of schizophrenia to genes expressed in the placenta while in utero, scientists have now zeroed in on the combination of risk factors that could predict which infants are at greatest risk of developing the condition later in | Continue reading
Suicide is a major threat to public health. In recent years, suicide rates have actually worsened in the US, and tragically, it's a phenomenon that's accelerating even among children. | Continue reading
Where does the mind 'meet' the brain? While there's no shortage of research into the effects of psychedelics, drugs like LSD still have much to teach us about the way the brain operates – and can shine a light on the mysterious interface between co | Continue reading
There's already a long list of reasons to like trees, we know. Warding off depression could be the latest entry on that list, based on a study of 9,751 residents in Leipzig, Germany. | Continue reading
No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists. | Continue reading
Given all the logistics involved, it's unlikely that humanity will ever see our way outside the Solar System to colonise exoplanets. But the possibility of settling elsewhere inside the Solar System isn't so far-fetched. | Continue reading
Physicists have observed a new state of matter at work inside an elusive thread of quantum gas. | Continue reading
Here's proof of how far we've come in science - in June 2017, researchers recorded up-close footage of a single DNA molecule replicating itself for the first time, and it's raised questions about how we assumed the process played out. | Continue reading
One of the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics could be explained by an equally weird idea – that causation can run backwards in time as well as forwards. | Continue reading
Scientists are edging closer to making a super-secure, super-fast quantum internet possible: they've now been able to 'teleport' high-fidelity quantum information over a total distance of 44 kilometres (27 miles). | Continue reading
Just when we thought octopuses couldn't be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet. | Continue reading
Scientists have just set a new world record for high-temperature sustained plasma with the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device, reaching an ion temperature of above 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenhei | Continue reading
Almost a millennium ago, a major upheaval occurred in Earth's atmosphere: a giant cloud of sulphur-rich particles flowed throughout the stratosphere, turning skies dark for months or even years, before ultimately falling down to Earth. | Continue reading
One of the most consumed drugs in the US – and the most commonly taken analgesic worldwide – could be doing a lot more than simply taking the edge off your headache, recent evidence suggests. | Continue reading
Like watching a movie in reverse, physicists have just demonstrated a new technique for the time-reversal of a wave of optical light. | Continue reading
Improving the efficiency of solar cells can make a huge difference to the amount of energy produced from the same surface area and the same amount of sunshine, and another world record has been beaten in the push for better yields. | Continue reading
If we're going to get better at powering the planet with renewable energy, we need to get better at finding ways of efficiently storing that energy until it's needed – and scientists have identified a particular material that could give us exactly | Continue reading
Invisible structures generated by gravitational interactions in the Solar System have created a "space superhighway" network, astronomers have discovered. | Continue reading
Feasts are rare on the barren landscape of the ocean depths. So researchers couldn't believe their luck when they stumbled on a feeding frenzy of deep-sea sharks chowing down on a fallen swordfish off the US coast in July 2019. | Continue reading
China successfully powered up its "artificial sun" nuclear fusion reactor for the first time, state media reported Friday, marking a great advance in the country's nuclear power research capabilities. | Continue reading