To Be, Or Not to Be: On Whether Animals Can Commit Suicide

Can animals reflect on, and reject, their conditions of existence? The philosopher Owen Flanagan has pointed out that when Hamlet poses the question that has become the single most powerful query of all English literature, “he is, of course, contemplating suicide.

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Homeopaths to pay £120,000 bill for failed legal challenge against NHS

Taxpayer's should not pick up the bill for “tap water masquerading as medicine” NHS England said it will seek full reimbursement after judges dismissed the homeopaths’ challenge in June.

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String Theory May Create Far Fewer Universes Than Thought

The problem with string theory, according to some physicists, is that it makes too many universes. It predicts not one but some 10500 versions of spacetime, each with their own laws of physics. But with so many universes on the table, how can the theory explain why ours has the features it does?

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Almost 80% of US workers live from paycheck to paycheck. Here's why

America doesn’t have a jobs crisis. It has a ‘good jobs’ crisis – where too much employment is insecure, and poorly paid

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How Robot Hands Are Evolving to Do What Ours Can

Robotic hands could only do what vast teams of engineers programmed them to do. Now they can learn more complex tasks on their own.

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Humanity Has Killed 83% of All Wild Mammals and Half of All Plants: Study

Of all the birds left in the world, 70% are poultry chickens and other farmed birds. When it comes to planet Earth, humans are very tiny. The weight of all 7.6 billion humans makes up just 0.01% of all biomass on Earth, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. Bacteria, by comparison, make up 13% of all biomass, plants account for 83%, and all other forms of life make up 5% of the total weight, according to the report.

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Men also suffer from after-sex sadness or 'post-coital dysphoria', study finds

"After sexual activity I get a strong sense of self-loathing about myself."

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A Toxic Tide Is Killing Florida Wildlife

Florida has an algae problem, and it’s big. This year, an overgrowth in the waters off the state’s southwestern coast is killing wildlife and making some beaches noxious. The toxic algal bloom, known as a red tide, is not unusual. They appear off the state’s coast almost every year. But this one, still going strong after roughly nine months, is the longest since 2006, when blooms that originated in 2004 finally abated after 17 months.

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Simulation Training for Future Surgeons (practicing their skills with underground)

Video game which can interface with a laparoscope enabling surgeons to home their skills.

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Einstein’s General Relativity Passes Black Hole Test

At the center of our Milky Way Galaxy lies the 4-million-solar-mass black hole named Sagittarius A*. This gravitational monster is surrounded by a group of stars orbiting around it at high speed. This extreme environment makes it the perfect place to explore gravitational physics, and particularly to test Einstein’s relativity theory.

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‘It’s sobering’: A once-exciting HIV cure strategy fails its test in people

When Science published a monkey study nearly 2 years ago that showed an anti-inflammatory antibody effectively cured monkeys intentionally infected with the simian form of the AIDS virus, the dramatic results turned many heads. But some skeptical researchers thought the data looked too good to be true and predicted the intervention wouldn’t work on HIV in humans. They were right.

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Enormous penguin population crashes by almost 90%

The world’s second-largest penguin colony has collapsed in just a few decades, falling from half a million breeding pairs in the 1980s to just tens of thousands in 2017. Breeding colonies of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) occupy unvegetated ground on islands in the Southern Ocean, including the remote Ile aux Cochons.

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How Mars’s Close Encounters Helped Us Map the Red Planet

National Geographic’s archive has maps of Mars dating back to when some scientists still thought there might be Martian-made canals on its surface. By Betsy Mason.

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The Mysterious Return of Ozone-Depleting CFCs

CFCs, the harmful ozone-depleting chemicals banned back in the 1980s, are experiencing a mysterious comeback

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New Ebola species is reported for first time in a decade

The family of Ebola viruses has just gotten a bit bigger. The government of Sierra Leone has announced that a new species of Ebola, the sixth, has been discovered there in bats. It has been called, provisionally, the Bombali virus, after a district in the north of the country where it was found. There’s no evidence the new virus has infected people, although EcoHealth Alliance, an environmental nonprofit group involved in the discovery, said on Twitter that it has the potential to infect human cells.

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The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature

New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.”

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Lunar Eclipse of the Century | Pictures

A full moon rises behind the Temple of Poseidon before a lunar eclipse in Cape Sounion, near Athens, Greece.

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Circumcising newborn boys increases their risk of cot death

Circumcising newborn boys increases their risk of cot death, new research suggests. Male babies who have their foreskins removed are likely to suffer from the condition, also known as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), due to the stress of the procedure, a UK study found.

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First fossilized snake embryo ever discovered rewrites history of ancient snakes

The first-ever discovery of an ancient snake embryo, preserved in 105-million-year-old amber, provides important new information on the evolution of modern snakes, according to a new study led by University of Alberta paleontologists. “This snake is linked to ancient snakes from Argentina, Africa, India and Australia,” explained paleontologist Michael Caldwell, lead author and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. “It is an important—and until now, missing—component of understanding snake evolution from southern continents, that is Gondwana, in the mid-Mesozoic.”

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Squares and circles are so basic. Get down with this new shape, the scutoid

It's not just a cool "twisted prism," either. The scutoid plays a role in the development of biological organisms. By Adam Rosenberg.

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Time is running out in the tropics - researchers warn of global biodiversity collapse

A global biodiversity collapse is imminent unless we take urgent, concerted action to reverse species loss in the tropics, according to a major scientific study in the prestigious journal Nature.  

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Why Is There a ‘Gaming Disorder’ But No ‘Smartphone Disorder?’

The international health community has decided that if you play video games like Fortnite or World of Warcraft a lot, you might suffer from a mental-health issue: Gaming Disorder. It’s a behavioral condition that the World Health Organization has added to the proposed 11th revision of its International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, or ICD-11, the first update to the classification since 1992.

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How Bad Karma and Bad Engineering Doomed an Ancient Cambodian Capital

Never doubt the power of the monsoon.

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'The discourse is unhinged': how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong

Social media has allowed self-proclaimed ‘AI influencers’ who do nothing more than paraphrase Elon Musk to cash in on this hype with low-quality pieces. The result is dangerous

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Indian warrior king's rocket cache found in abandoned well

Archaeologists find corroded shells stored by powerful 18th-century ruler Tipu Sultan

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Ancient Pottery Used To Play Back Recorded Voices From The Distant Past

Archaeologist believe they have discovered sound recordings encoded in ancient artifacts.

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This Man Says the Mind Has No Depths

Nick Chater argues our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world.

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A neural network that operates at the speed of light

A team of researchers at the University of California has developed a novel kind of neural network—one that uses light instead of electricity to arrive at results. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their ideas, their working device, its performance, and the types of applications they believe could be well served by such a network. By Bob Yirka.

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Physics Needs Philosophy / Philosophy Needs Physics

Philosophy has always played an essential role in the development of science, physics in particular, and is likely to continue to do so. By Carlo Rovelli.

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Cannabis Doesn’t Help Exercising COPD Patients

At first blush, it would seem almost obvious that individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) did not show improvement after inhaling vaporized cannabis. However, with real clinical data for cannabis’ true effects on human health being in scant supply, we should expect a range of studies and results to pop-up over the next several years, as more places begin to legalize the drug.

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These Indian fishermen take plastic out of the sea and use it to build roads

Every one of India’s 1.3 billion people uses an average 11kg of plastic each year. After being used, much of this plastic finds its way to the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, where it can maim and kill fish, birds and other marine wildlife. Fisherman in India’s southern state of Kerala are taking on the battle to cut the level of plastic waste in the oceans. When the trawlers drag their nets through the water, they end up scooping out huge amounts of plastic along with the fish. Until recently the fishermen would simply throw the plastic junk back into the water.

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Scientists watch star speed across the universe and prove Einstein right

Scientists have watched a star as it sped past a black hole, lighting up one of the mysteries at the heart of the universe. The unprecedented view of the dramatic behaviour was not just an exciting peek into the universe. It also confirms for the first time that Einstein's predictions about what happens to a star when it passes near a supermassive black hole are correct.

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‘Amazing Dragon’ Discovery in China Reshapes History of Dinosaurs’ Evolution

Fossilized remains of Lingwulong shenqi show that big herbivores with long necks reached East Asia and evolved earlier than scientists had thought.

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After Last Year's Hurricanes, Caribbean Lizards Are Better at Holding on for Dear Life

A stunning case of natural selection in action.

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Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries

Reserves of cobalt and nickel used in electric-vehicle cells will not meet future demand. Refocus research to find new electrodes based on common elements such as iron and silicon, urge Kostiantyn Turcheniuk and colleagues.

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Is This Fungus Using a Virus To Control An Animal's Mind?

An unusual detective story. By Ed Yong.

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This brain-controlled prosthetic will lend you a hand — and a whole arm

For years, scientists have been exploring how we can use signals from the brain to control prosthetic limbs. Usually, this work is focused on restoring motor function to people who have lost an arm or a leg, but new research from Japan shows how the same technology can also be used to augment existing human capabilities.

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Reversing cause and effect is no trouble for quantum computers

Watch a movie backwards and you'll likely get confused—but a quantum computer wouldn't.

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Worms frozen in permafrost for up to 42,000 years come back to life

Nematodes moving and eating again for the first time since the Pleistocene age in major scientific breakthrough, say experts.

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Supermassive Black Hole Caught Sucking Energy From Nearby Starlight

Astronomy.com is for anyone who wants to learn more about astronomy events, cosmology, planets, galaxies, asteroids, astrophotography, the Big Bang, black holes, comets, constellations, eclipses, exoplanets, nebulae, meteors, quasars, observing, telescopes, NASA, Hubble, space missions, stargazing, and more

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Up to Two-Thirds of Bitcoin Transactions Have No Economic Value

On any given day, as much as two-thirds of the transaction activity registered on the Bitcoin network has nothing to do with buying goods and services or trading the virtual currency.

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Why We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space

My conclusion is that in a colonized universe the probability of the annihilation of the human race could actually rise rather than fall. By Phil Torres.

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First Successful Test of Einstein’s General Relativity Near Supermassive Black Hole

Observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope have for the first time revealed the effects predicted by Einstein’s general relativity on the motion of a star passing through the extreme gravitational field near the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way. This long-sought result represents the climax of a 26-year-long observation campaign using ESO’s telescopes in Chile.

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This Is What Happened When I Asked My Friends to Rate Me

Don't like your Uber rating? Well, in a not-so-distant future, you just might have a score for everything else in your life.

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Amazon’s facial recognition matched 28 members of Congress to criminal mugshots

New ACLU test illustrates the limits of Amazon’s Rekognition system

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New study linking warming with disrupted Atlantic flow has scientists “grumpy”

Recent paper makes a big claim, but other scientists are unconvinced.

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Tesla Powerpacks aid Samoa's transition to 100% renewable energy

The island nation of Samoa is continuing its effort to convert from diesel-reliant powerplants to 100% renewable energy with the help of Tesla’s scalable Powerpack battery storage solution. Over the past year, the California-based electric car and energy company had been hard at work installing and launching two Tesla Powerpack sites in the country, both of which are designed to capture the abundance of renewable energy, otherwise lost without a means for storage, and offer grid stability to local utilities.

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Meet the Woman Who Rocked Particle Physics—Three Times

Sau Lan Wu spent decades working to establish the Standard Model of particle physics. Now she’s searching for what lies beyond it. By Joshua Roebke.

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Telepathic communication just 'a matter of time' as twins reveal blueprint for brain interface

Telepathic communication is not a matter of if, but when, according to a team of scientists who have studied conjoined twins to validate their theory.

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Richard Branson Hopes to Be in Space by the End of the Year

Virgin Group Founder Richard Branson says his Virgin Galactic spaceflight company is just about ready to launch.

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