Latest science news, discoveries and scientific developments.
Naming a chicken and describing its favorite habits is enough to make preschoolers choose poultry less often. This effect translates into verbal declarations and actual meal choices, but food preferences still most often win over empathy, according to a new paper by researchers from SWPS University.
In 1960, scientists predicted that runaway population growth would bring humanity to the brink of destruction on November 13, 2026, and their mathematical forecasts remained surprisingly accurate for decades. But as birth rates declined and population growth slowed, the terrifying prediction unraveled, revealing how even convincing scientific models can fail when human behavior changes.
Stanford scientists have developed a revolutionary microscope that reveals the hidden inner workings of living cells in real time, without the fluorescent labels that can interfere with observations. The breakthrough could provide new insights into cancer, infectious diseases, and how drugs interact with cells.
What happens when political violence is presented as a justified response to threat or injustice coming from an out-group? A study by Ursula Daxecker, director at the Max Planck Institute for Politics and Social Science in Göttingen, and Neeraj Prasad of the University of Amsterdam, published in The Journal of Politics, finds that legitimizing violence can increase public approval of both violence and the parties involved in it. Among BJP supporters, the effect went even further: when violence was portrayed as justified, they were less approving of a peaceful response by their own party.
SpaceX just delivered some surprisingly strange cargo to the International Space Station, including tiny brain models, 3D heart tissue, and technology for making artificial retinas in space. Scientists hope these experiments could unlock new ways to treat devastating brain diseases, restore eyesight, and test future medicines. The shipment also includes materials for creating unusual glass in near weightlessness and the station’s final upgraded solar arrays.
Scientists have discovered a gene that determines whether Japanese snails develop shells that are left- or right-coiling—with implications for understanding the underlying handedness of our own bodies. The researchers from the University of Nottingham and Tohoku University studied wild Euhadra snails in Japan to understand what makes one snail a mirror image of another.
The European rabbit is a common sight in the British countryside today. Yet it was not always so. They are not native to the British Isles and are one of the most devastating invasive species.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered that a distant alien planet's atmosphere is surprisingly lopsided. Located 1,300 light-years away, the scorching gas giant WASP-17b experiences powerful winds that redistribute heat, causing one side of its atmosphere to bulge outward. A groundbreaking new mapping technique revealed these hidden distortions, confirming predictions about how extreme temperatures and winds shape alien worlds.
A University of Missouri astronomer is leading a team of 130 researchers from 62 institutions—including NASA, the California Institute of Technology, Princeton University and Harvard University—on an ambitious mission to capture an unprecedented view of the early universe.
Plants begin responding to spaceflight almost immediately after leaving Earth, according to a new University of Florida study that captured the earliest stages of biological adaptation during a commercial suborbital mission. Published in the journal npj Microgravity, the study reports the results of an experiment conducted by a UF astronaut during Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-26 flight on Aug. 29, 2024.
How do young stars reshape the clouds from which they are born? A new high-resolution 3D model developed by an international team led by Dr Brandt Gaches from the University of Duisburg-Essen shows how the uneven structure of stellar nurseries creates shadows that alter their chemistry and influence the infrared emission observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. The model has now been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Every time a tissue grows or renews itself, cells must divide inside an already crowded environment. That creates a fundamental problem that scientists have not fully understood: How does a tightly packed sheet of cells make room for two daughter cells when there was once only one?
Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist and an online influencer with millions of followers, faces charges in several countries of allegedly causing physical harm, including rape and sex trafficking of women and girls.
Quantum computers represent a next step in the fast-paced evolution of technology. Using quantum bits (qubits), they have the potential to run certain calculations exponentially faster than conventional computers. However, developing and fine-tuning quantum computers requires an enormous number of repetitive tests. To accelerate quantum technology development, we need a method that can read quantum states at ultrafast speeds.
Australian researchers and international collaborators have demonstrated a solar-driven approach to convert glycerol, a low-value byproduct of biodiesel production, into hydrogen and higher-value chemicals. Using advanced techniques at the Australian Synchrotron, they revealed how the catalyst changed while it was working.
For the first time, scientists have achieved strong coupling between light and long-lived acoustic vibrations in an optical fiber. Optical fibers are used in both classical telecommunications and quantum communication and could serve not only as connections between computing nodes but also as quantum processors themselves in the future. The results, published in Nature Physics, pave the way for new technologies in quantum signal processing.
Researchers have developed and tested a new locking method for gravitational wave detectors that will advance the discovery of distant black holes and neutron stars colliding.
Archaeologists digging at a 13,800-year-old site in interior Alaska have unearthed thousands of artifacts and fossils, including what may be the bones of the earliest domesticated dogs in the Americas, the earliest needles and dwellings in the Western Hemisphere, and stone tools that reveal cultural connections across the Bering Land Bridge.At a site called Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ (which means "They Were There" in the Alaska Native Athabascan language), about 34 miles (55 kilometers) southeast of Fairbanks, archaeologists have excavated an encampment that some of the first people to settle in North America used off and on for a millennium. Shégˊ Xdaltthˊíˊ is located in eastern Beringia, the geogra...
"Necklaces" of ultracold atoms have provided new evidence to support a nearly 100-year-old quantum theory.In 1931, physicists were trying to use quantum mechanics to explain why some materials are magnetic. Then, a young physicist named Hans Bethe looked at a single row of electrons. Each electron's spin can point up or down. Bethe worked out the math for how such a row behaves and found that if a few spins in the row flip, they can stick together and travel down the row as a single unit.Decades later, physicists found that Bethe's method also works for larger particles moving along a line, such as atoms. If those particles attract each other, the math predicts they will bind into clusters c...
A Ph.D. student at the University of Sydney has produced the first comprehensive classification system and map of Martian soils, creating a new framework that could help scientists compare landscapes across the Red Planet and identify promising locations for future exploration, habitation and food production.