Inside a windowless concrete room in Cleveland, Ohio, scientists have built a tiny version of Hell on Earth.

Aboard the International Space Station (@ISS), NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough snapped this image and wrote, 'Beautiful #aurora over the North Atlantic in the background of our solar arrays. Goodnight from Space Station.' The dancing lights of the aurora provide…

OUR FAVORITE SCIENCE IMAGES OF THE WEEK Bird Goggles For Science Yes there are goggles on that parrotlet. In a study to investigate how birds interact with the air around them as they fly, researchers had parrotlets fly through a field of lasers. While these…

There's no escaping it. For the first time, scientists have detected trace amounts of ammonia in the upper troposphere - the lowest of Earth's atmospheric layers. Released into the atmosphere as an agricultural emission from livestock farming and fertilisation…

The future of fish. Researchers have discovered that a fish living off the east coast of the US has evolved to be 8,000 times more resilient to toxic waste than normal fish. The small striped ‘mud minnow’, or killifish, is known for living in heavily polluted…

Venus used to be as fit for life as Earth. BY DAVID GRINSPOON DECEMBER 8, 2016 On the day that I was born—winter solstice, 1959—a headline in Life magazine proclaimed “Target Venus: There May be Life There!” It told of how scientists rode a balloon to an…

Think You Need A Daily Vitamin Supplement? Think Again It's 6 am, the alarm goes off, and you start your daily routine: Get out of bed, brush your teeth, eat breakfast, and pop your multivitamin. Sound familiar? According to a 2016 study, about 52% of Americans…

We are ready with preliminary results.

How to learn anything faster. As we get older, learning something new becomes more complex, tedious, and time-consuming than ever, and those child geniuses who can speak five different languages become our favourite dinnertime conversation, because how do…

Human auto-complete. Neuroscientists think they've finally figured out what our brain is doing when we finish someone's sentence for them - and it goes against our current understanding of how memory and language interact. Based on brain activity measurements…

Not a Death Star. Bizarre pictures coming out of Japan last week show what appears to be an oddly spherical cloud hovering over the city of Fujisawa, just south of Tokyo. According to reports from the photographer, the cloud started to lose its shape as soon…

Can Make Machines More Creative Despite nature’s bewildering complexity, the driving force behind it is incredibly simple. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is an uncomplicated but brutally effective optimization strategy that has allowed life to solve complex problems…

Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics. BY CALEB SCHARF ILLUSTRATION BY TIANHUA MAO NOVEMBER 17, 2016 Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced…

The young physicist’s quest to prove the theories of Ernst Mach. BY AMANDA GEFTER ILLUSTRATION BY JASU HU DECEMBER 1, 2016 When they met, Einstein wasn’t Einstein yet. He was just Albert Einstein, a kid, about 17, with a dark cloud of teenage angst and a…

NASA is certainly not in the business of spreading panic over asteroid strikes - every time one comes close, we see yet another press release telling us that all known 'potentially hazardous asteroids' have less than a 0.01 percent chance of impacting Earth…

When most people think about the hardest naturally occurring material on Earth, they think of diamonds - those pretty stones in our engagement rings that can cut steel and rock.

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Keeping women alive to further the spread. One of the most persistent mysteries in medical science is why certain infections appear to cause more severe symptoms in men than they do in women.  Men infected with tuberculosis are 1.5 times more likely to die…

@science Brace yourself, North America. Stay warm, guys: newly released NASA images show the brutal polar vortex that's descended upon North America this week, and is predicted to bring record low temperatures to the US and Canada. The data was captured by…

This is happening. Once 2016 comes to a close, the Arctic will have experienced its hottest year on record, and researchers have found that it’s now warming twice as fast as any other place on Earth. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…