Science News

The Lasker Foundation has announced the winners of its 2026 awards for basic medical research, clinical science and public service.

A rare sighting of a bigfin squid near an underwater mountain off California is the first confirmed live observation of the bizarre animal in the northeastern Pacific, researchers say.

The more we learn about chimpanzees, the more they resemble us - but the further back in time our shared ancestor seems to be. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how both can be true

For decades, physicists have searched for dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up roughly 85% of all matter in the universe. Although its gravitational influence shapes galaxies and the large-scale struct...

Hunter-gatherers from the last ice age sucked on betel nuts to soothe their toothaches, a new study reveals.

The human brain flushes out waste products while we sleep and now it seems that certain sounds might enhance the process

Strange, rounded grooves in prehistoric teeth are thought to have been made by regularly sucking whole betel nuts to extract a pain-relieving compound. This marks the earliest known example of probable substance addictio...

Unusuallyhigh temperaturesover the mountainous regioncankick-starta chain of events that ultimatelyleads to a severe deluge on the US West Coast, scientists say

Scientists have identified a "climate teleconnection" between the Rocky Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau, where warm spots left a kink in the jet stream that intensifed weather in the western U.S.

Readers continue to share stories of how their own dogs respond to aircrafts

With little in the way of significant discoveries since 2012, there have been mutterings that particle physics is at a dead end. However, new dark matter results suggest an exciting new way to hunt for reality's undi...

Why do people appear younger and better-looking in a mirror than in a photograph? Are humans the only animals that cry? If so, why?

A reader thinks outside the box on ways to mitigate against this slow-forming issue

Tom Gauld's weekly cartoon

The upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory should be able to spot the glint of water on habitable planets, and maybe more

(Fe0.63Ni0.3Pd0.07)3P, or FNPP, is a magnetic material that exhibits complex magnetic structures even at room temperature. This makes the material of interest for spintronics, a field that could enable data processing wi...

A new study looks at "consciousness steering" in AI, but could this technology actually achieve this level of self-awareness in the first place?

Anthropologists have discovered the first-ever Denisovan arm bone in a cave in southwest China, which also held thousands of prehistoric animal bones and stone tools.

A site in China is just the third to give us an insight into the way the enigmatic Denisovans lived. The archaeology at the site suggests the ancient humans were skilled hunters, although their stone tools were relativel...

Particle collisions are inherently quantum, but much of that character is lost when we turn them into classical data. Sarah Alam Malik explores whether preserving more of it could help us spot signs of dark matter and ot...

Novel simulations, which reassessed the ancient collision between Earth and the protoplanet Theia, suggest that the moon could have emerged from the aftermath of this impact much more quickly than scientists previously t...

8 September should have been an exciting day of celebration for mathematicians worldwide. Instead, it became a confusing, salacious and intriguing drama. Why was the solution to one of the world's toughest mathematic...