It's not every day that an asteroid from outside the Solar System comes whizzing past your front door. In fact, it's only ever happened once that we've observed, when astronomers spotted interstellar asteroid 'Oumuamua in October.

Rebecca Bendick would like you to not panic. The University of Montana geophysicist knows you may have read the articles warning about "swarms of devastating earthquakes" that will allegedly rock the planet next year thanks to a slowdown of the Earth's rotation.…

Scientists have linked a surge in Earth's oxygen levels some 455 million years ago with an explosion in biodiversity on the planet, as nature took advantage of the extra breathing space to transform marine life and develop new species. That boom in biodiversity…

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Lightning can trigger nuclear reactions, creating rare atomic isotopes Rare forms of atoms, like carbon-13, carbon-14, and nitrogen-15, have long been used to figure out the ages of ancient artifacts and probe the nuances of prehistoric food chains. The source…

A mysterious protein that binds to RNA has been found to play an important role in the formation of memories in rats.

Good news, aspiring Martian farmers! The soil composition of Mars oughtn't hinder earthworm reproduction, if experiments here on Earth are any indication.

A physicist from the University of Campinas in Brazil isn't a big fan of the idea that time started with a so-called Big Bang. Instead, Juliano César Silva Neves imagines a collapse followed by an expansion, one that could even still carry the scars of a…

Life's tough 8,000 metres (26,000 feet) beneath the ocean's surface. The pressure is 800 times that on the surface, the temperature is just above freezing, and there's zero light.

Earth is full of bizarre landscapes. Some are land formations moulded over thousands of years, while others are human-made creations that have altered the planet in strange ways.

The search for dark matter continues, in part through China's Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) – and the probe just picked up a suggestion of something on its instruments that suggests we could be getting closer to the big discovery.

HIV remains one of the continent's most intractable health challenges. Tremendous progress is being made to understand the virus, the immune mechanisms that contribute to its control and for new antiretroviral drugs and vaccines to be developed to treat and…

As effective as antibiotics often are at helping us fight off infection and the associated bacteria, they might also be reducing the bacteria-killing power of the body's own immune cells at the same time, according to new research. That could significantly…

An exotic kind of particle so mysterious that it was suspected to be impossible has finally been identified by physicists – and not just once, but twice. Two new theoretical predictions of an elusive form of matter called tetraquarks provide the firmest evidence…

Picture a scientist. Seriously, right now. I'm not going to discuss the nature of the person that you have in your mind (although I am going to guess: White? Male? Crazy hair? That's not surprising, but another topic entirely). I'm more curious about what…

CRISPR-Cas9 technology allows scientists to insert or remove genes by making a cut in a DNA molecule; an ability that has applications ranging from the creation of pigs with lower levels of body fat to the eradication of certain diseases.

Scientists just took a big step towards the goal of quantum computers, and even a quantum internet to connect them, after successfully using photons to transfer quantum information between a cold atomic gas and a solid crystal.

Researchers have devised a new method to predict the hand preference of babies while they're still in the mother's womb. The discovery adds to a growing body of research showing our handedness is innate - but on top of that, the screening method could also…

The brain is really little more than a collection of electrical signals. If we can learn to catalogue those then, in theory, you could upload someone's mind into a computer, allowing them to live forever as a digital form of consciousness, just lik