One of the biggest cosmic mysteries has just been used to investigate another huge mystery. Astronomers used powerful bursts of radio waves traced back to distant galaxies to probe the space between the stars - and revealed where the Universe's missi | Continue reading
New satellite data from the European Space Agency (ESA) reveal that the mysterious anomaly weakening Earth's magnetic field continues to evolve, with the most recent observations showing we could soon be dealing with more than one of these strange ph | Continue reading
A swirl spotted in the turbulent disc of dust encircling a young star called AB Aurigae was revealed last week in high resolution, and to much fanfare in the astronomy community. Such a distinctive disturbance, researchers suggested, could be the sig | Continue reading
For years, the internet has hemmed and hawed over a mysterious yet universal truth: a grape, sliced nearly in half and placed in the microwave, will suddenly begin to spit plasma. | Continue reading
Scientists think they've identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another – even if they've been surgically severed | Continue reading
A sprawling structure regarded as the world's oldest known temple was designed with an understanding of geometric principles somewhat unusual for the hunter-gatherer cultures thought to have built it, researchers say. | Continue reading
An international team of scientists has found new evidence of rivers that flowed on the surface of Mars billions of years ago — a discovery that could give us new insights into the search for ancient life on the Red Planet. | Continue reading
A type of rocket engine once thought impossible has just been fired up in the lab. Engineers have built and successfully tested what is known as a rotating detonation engine, which generates thrust via a self-sustaining wave of detonations that trave | Continue reading
A prototype jet engine can propel itself without using any fossil fuels, potentially paving the way for carbon-neutral air travel. | Continue reading
A fresh new look at a 4 billion-year-old Martian meteorite has revealed organic compounds containing nitrogen - the first real evidence of fixed nitrogen molecules on the Red Planet. | Continue reading
What if the "great ocean garbage patches" were just the tip of the iceberg? While more than 10 million tonnes of plastic waste enters the sea each year, we actually see just 1 percent of it – the portion that floats on the ocean surface. What happe | Continue reading
A vitamin commonly produced by sun-exposed skin cells might play a role in preventing death by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, according to new research. | Continue reading
A long-known but under-studied deposit of Cretaceous rock on the edge of the Sahara desert was more than just an ancient stomping ground for dinosaurs, according to a comprehensive new paper. | Continue reading
Scientists have found evidence that a fundamental physical constant used to measure electromagnetism between charged particles can in fact be rather inconstant, according to measurements taken from a quasar some 13 billion light-years away. | Continue reading
Researchers have finally found credible records of someone being killed by a falling meteorite. | Continue reading
NASA engineers have designed a mass-producible ventilator tailored to coronavirus patients, and it could get emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration by the weekend. | Continue reading
It's hard to predict things in a pandemic. The situation changes so much on a daily basis that everything you thought you knew last week is wrong by the end of the day. Things are changing so fast that even the solid certainties that we thought we we | Continue reading
Much of the work undertaken by artificial intelligence involves a training process known as machine learning, where AI gets better at a task such as recognising a cat or mapping a route the more it does it. Now that same technique is being use to cre | Continue reading
You may have heard of Folding@home, the number-crunching app you can run on your computer to help researchers tackle certain medical problems, including the new coronavirus. In the past month, the network of volunteers who've installed it has become | Continue reading
An ambitious "cloud brightening" experiment has been carried out over Australia's Great Barrier Reef in an early-stage trial that scientists hope could become a futuristic way to protect coral from global warming. | Continue reading
A single star called S2 looping around the supermassive black hole in the centre of our galaxy just demonstrated a prediction of general relativity in the most extreme environment we can test it in - putting yet another feather in the theory's alread | Continue reading
Massive stars don't die quietly. Their deaths are spectacular explosions that can outshine entire galaxies - and now, astronomers have identified the most powerful of these exploding stars we've ever witnessed. | Continue reading
Almost 13,000 years ago, a group of prehistoric nomads in what we now call Syria embarked upon a historic change. They abandoned their hunter-gatherer ways, and became the earliest known pioneers of a new milestone in human civilisation: agriculture. | Continue reading
Some days, you might feel like a pretty substantial person. Maybe you have a lot of friends, or an important job, or a really big car. | Continue reading
Flights are grounded. Fewer trains are running. Rush hour is gone. The world - particularly in cities - is looking drastically different during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. | Continue reading
There's still a lot we don't know about the coronavirus that has caused a pandemic of a new disease called COVID-19. That includes what the symptoms are and how varied they might be. | Continue reading
Poor old Uranus just can't seem to catch a break. Something already tipped the planet on its side, so its orbit is perpendicular to those of the other Solar System planets. It probably smells terrible. And now scientists have discovered that the atmo | Continue reading
In the space of a few weeks, we have all learned a lot about COVID-19 and the virus that causes it: SARS-CoV-2. But there have also been a lot of rumours. | Continue reading
Scientists have found naturally occurring superconducting materials in extraterrestrial objects for the first time, discovering superconductive grains embedded inside two distinct meteorites that crash-landed on Earth. | Continue reading
Spend any amount of time gazing at an ant's nest (hey, what you do with your time is your business) and it's clear that the whirling mass of tiny bodies is an impenetrable, chaotic mess to the casual observer. | Continue reading
Why don't we have drugs to treat COVID-19 and how long will it take to develop them? SARS-CoV-2 – the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19 – is completely new and attacks cells in a novel way. Every virus is different and so are the drug | Continue reading
The World Health Organization recommended Tuesday that people suffering COVID-19 symptoms avoid taking ibuprofen, after French officials warned that anti-inflammatory drugs could worsen effects of the virus. | Continue reading
Time, as far as we know, moves only in one direction. But in 2018, researchers found events in some gamma-ray burst pulses that seemed to repeat themselves as though they were going backwards in time. | Continue reading
New analysis of organic molecules found in dried-up Martian mud in the Gale Crater has revealed an intriguing possibility. Scientists have concluded that we can't rule out those molecules actually have a biological origin. | Continue reading
Something in the Universe is creating more mass than we can detect directly. We know it's there because of its gravitational effect on the stuff we can detect; but we don't know what it is, or how it got here. | Continue reading
It's hard living in a relativistic Universe, where even the nearest stars are so far away and the speed of light is absolute. It is little wonder then why science fiction franchises routinely employ FTL (Faster-than-Light) as a plot device. | Continue reading
It's hard living in a relativistic Universe, where even the nearest stars are so far away and the speed of light is absolute. It is little wonder then why science fiction franchises routinely employ FTL (Faster-than-Light) as a plot device. | Continue reading
Before it's observed, an electron is a hot mess of possibility. Just like the metaphorical Schrödinger's cat, it's only once we lift the lid from its metaphorical box and take a good, close look that an electron settles on a clear position around an | Continue reading
The World Health Organisation said this week it may be 18 months before a vaccine against the coronavirus is publicly available. | Continue reading
Some truths about the Universe and our experience in it seem immutable. The sky is up. Gravity sucks. Nothing can travel faster than light. Multicellular life needs oxygen to live. Except we might need to rethink that last one. | Continue reading
In the depths of a European cave, dwells what must be the laziest and most underwhelming of all creatures to have ever been called a dragon. With disturbingly fleshy-coloured skin, it has also earned the label of "human fish". | Continue reading
To cram ever more computing power into your pocket, engineers need to come up with increasingly ingenious ways to add transistors to an already crowded space. | Continue reading
Scientists have 'puppeteered' the movements of a jellyfish and made it even faster than the real thing. | Continue reading
To understand how atoms unite to turn into molecules, we need to catch them in action. But to do that, physicists must force atoms to pause long enough for their exchanges to be recorded. That's no easy task, and one physicists from the University of | Continue reading
Scientists have managed to get two quantum memories entangled over 50 kilometres (31 miles) of fibre optic cables, almost 40 times the previous record. | Continue reading
Later today I'll lose consciousness for a few hours to rest and repair. There's a good chance you will, too. Yet as ubiquitous as sleep is, we know very little about which parts of the brain are fundamental to staying awake. | Continue reading
One of the defining characteristics of the mysterious deep-space signals we call fast radio bursts is that they are unpredictable. They belch out across the cosmos without rhyme or reason, with no discernible pattern, making them incredibly hard to s | Continue reading
If humans are truly capable of learning while we sleep, our noses might be the key. A new study on children suggests that subtle smells, like the fragrance of a rose, might help us to strengthen specific memories from the day. | Continue reading