Your Daily Science News Source from Around the Globe
The United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) begins on Sunday 31 October in Glasgow, and the outcome may determine whether the world moves closer to a net-zero…
An astonishing 82 percent decrease in the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy since 2010 has given the world a fighting chance to build a zero-emissions energy system which might…
Venture close enough to a black hole and you’ll quickly learn how the force of gravity warps the very fabric of reality. Here on Earth, gravity’s time-bending effect is nowhere…
Even when there’s not a cloud in the sky, there’s always water circulating in the atmosphere. Compared to all the H20 on Earth, there isn’t much up there – only…
Shooting a drop of water with one of the world’s most powerful lasers might not be an obvious way to make an ice cube. But it is one way, at…
A talking CGI dinosaur just gave an impassioned speech about climate change to world leaders in a new UN video. Will they take it seriously? The dinosaur, named Frankie according…
Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere reached record levels last year, the United Nations said Monday, in a stark warning as Britain’s Boris Johnson admitted being “very worried” about the…
Almost 20 years after researchers first predicted electron quadruplets, evidence of their existence has been shown to occur in experimental setups, representing a brand new state of matter that opens…
For the first time, physicists have been able to directly measure one of the ways exploding stars forge the heaviest elements in the Universe. By probing an accelerated beam of…
If you’re wondering just how much scientific consensus there is that humans have caused the climate of our planet to change, we can now put a number on it: 99.9…
Microplastics are turning up everywhere. We’ve found them in rivers, lakes, and oceans; in soil, snow and ice; in fish, whales, and us. In recent years, we’ve even started to…
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sparked worldwide excitement in March as particle physicists reported tantalizing evidence for new physics – potentially a new force of nature. Now, our new result,…
In attempts to understand the very nature of our reality, physicists sure have some mind-bending theories. Like what if information is a tangible and fundamental aspect of physical reality itself…
The Arctic may no longer be the refuge it once was for migrating animals. Scientists now fear that climate change and environmental degradation have turned the yearly journey of numerous…
If Earth’s temperature rises by a significant enough margin, we could see a major restructuring of the plankton species living in our oceans. Not only would the diversity of species…
The standard white cane is an essential aid for getting out and about for many visually impaired people, but to date, it hasn’t offered much in the way of affordable…
The aviation industry is necessary for the world we live in today, but it places a strain on the environment, thanks to emissions from petroleum-based fossil fuel. According to a…
The patterns of activity produced by our brains are unique. They’re so unique that we can use brain connectivity maps to identify individuals just as reliably as fingerprints. “An individual’s…
The fossil of a jaw bone could prove that domesticated dogs lived in Central America as far back as 12,000 years ago, according to a study by Latin American scientists.…
Scientists just broke the record for the coldest temperature ever measured in a lab: They achieved the bone-chilling temperature of 38 trillionths of a degree above -273.15 Celsius by dropping…
It’s clear that a nuclear war would be catastrophic for us and our planet – but just how catastrophic? A new study models the impact that smoke from the fall-out…
When I wake at 3am or so, I’m prone to picking on myself. And I know I’m not the only one who does this. A friend of mine calls 3am…
Scientists are getting closer to being able to spot Hawking radiation – that elusive thermal radiation thought to be produced by a black hole’s event horizon. Just understanding the concept…
A single bad El Niño can drive almost 6 million children into severe hunger, a new study has found. This is up to three times as many children that have…
Even if humanity beats the odds and caps global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, seas will rise for centuries to come and swamp cities currently home to…
Physicists have taken the first ever image of a Wigner crystal – a strange honeycomb-pattern material inside another material, made entirely out of electrons. Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner first theorized…
We now know, to within a tenth of a percent, how long a neutron can survive outside the atomic nucleus before decaying into a proton. This is the most precise…
Exactly how and when people settled in North America is a topic of much fascination for experts, and now a new analysis of ancient documents is shedding light on some…
Pre-human history is immensely hard to untangle. There are no early writings from the Neanderthals handily summarizing all the differences between the Australopithecus and the Orrorin. While we’re finding more…
When the Nobel Prize-winning US physicist Robert Hofstadter and his team fired highly energetic electrons at a small vial of hydrogen at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1956, they…
In the beginning, there was … well, maybe there was no beginning. Perhaps our Universe has always existed – and a new theory of quantum gravity reveals how that could…
Some problems are so big, you can’t really see them. Climate change is the perfect example. The basics are simple: the climate is heating up due to fossil fuel use.…
At some point in life, you have probably enjoyed a ‘flow’ state – when you’re so intensely focused on a task or activity, you experience a strong sense of control,…
For now, life is flourishing on our oxygen-rich planet, but Earth wasn’t always that way – and scientists have predicted that, in the future, the atmosphere will revert back to…
Communities that rely on the Colorado River are facing a water crisis. Lake Mead, the river’s largest reservoir, has fallen to levels not seen since it was created by the…
The more we look into the harsh extremes of Chile’s Atacama Desert, the more we find. Phenomena both mystifying and wonderful, occasionally bordering on alien. But in this incredibly dry…
Archaeologists recently discovered a 2,700-year-old private toilet inside the remains of an ancient royal estate in Jerusalem. It is a rare find, as thousands of years ago pooping in toilets…
Our planet’s air during the preindustrial period was not quite as pristine as you might think, according to new research out of Antarctica. An analysis of six ice core drillings…
Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for climate models and the understanding of physical systems. The…
More than five billion people could have difficulty accessing water in 2050, the United Nations warned Tuesday, urging leaders to seize the initiative at the COP26 summit. Already in 2018,…
Extreme urban heat exposure has dramatically increased since the early 1980s, with the total exposure tripling over the past 35 years. Today, about 1.7 billion people, nearly one-quarter of the…
US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch. The duo’s research, conducted independently of each other…
A huge oil spill is killing wildlife and threatening California’s beaches on Monday, in what officials said amounted to an “environmental catastrophe”. Birds and fish had begun washing up on…
Many of us come away from conversations with strangers feeling that the interaction has been awkward and unwanted on both sides. But what if we’re wrong? A new study suggests…
There’s a chance we’re overestimating how much children understand about the minds of others – in fact, we might be expecting too much of kids at too young an age.…
The polar jet stream circles the northern hemisphere, swirling up to nine miles above our heads like a curvy, ethereal crown on the planet. This band of strong wind separates…
Earth is getting dimmer, researchers have found, and climate change is likely to blame. As the oceans get hotter, they appear to be generating fewer bright clouds, which means less…