Latest science news, discoveries and scientific developments.
Research scientist Ashish Rajurkar kneels in the dirt, lifting a large clod of soil tangled around a soybean plant. He knocks away pieces of earth from the plant's roots, which slope straight down instead of out to the side like typical soybean plants.
Between 2006 and 2017, North Korea conducted six underground nuclear tests at its vast testing site at Mount Mantap in North Hamgyong province. Typically, underground explosions trigger an intense burst of minor earthquakes that die down once testing stops. But geologists have detected far more seismic activity after the final detonation, and it has persisted for years.
Ancient Chinese authorities used many creative ways to punish people, often with methods designed to mark them for life. One brutal example mentioned repeatedly in historical texts is cutting off a person's nose. However, archaeologists in China have never found skeletal evidence to prove that it occurred. But that may have changed following the discovery of a skeleton of a woman who lived in China about 700 years ago.
Despite the rapid development of generative AI and the high level of public interest, the use of AI in the day-to-day work of many employees is not yet the norm. This is the finding of the third wave of the Konstanz AI study, for which a total of 1,105 employees were surveyed in May 2026. The proportion of employees who use AI in their work rose only slightly from 35% to 38% compared with the previous year.
Douglas Seiler painstakingly sourced papyrus and reed pens from Egypt and traditional lampblack ink from Japan, then paid some high school students to inscribe the papyrus with lines from Star Wars and the Bible and a quote from the '60s sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits.
People with power are more quickly singled out as the culprit when something goes wrong but it is unclear who made the mistake. That is shown by a series of studies by researchers at the University of Amsterdam. In one, they analyzed almost 100,000 everyday conflicts on the Reddit page "Am I the Asshole?" According to the researchers, people with power are more readily blamed because others think they can "get away with anything." The findings are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The European Union has committed to achieving climate neutrality by 2050, a process that will require rapid and substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across all economic sectors.
Seeing a bachelor's thesis published in a scientific journal is relatively uncommon. For three theses linked to the same research group to result in scientific publications within just three months is downright rare. Yet that is exactly what has happened in Elsebeth Schröder's research group at the Division of Quantum Device Physics.
Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have extended the search for evidence of microscopic black holes produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The formation of these tiny, fleeting objects at the LHC represents one way theorists have sought to resolve anomalies in our understanding of the basic structure of spacetime, while the method used to look for them demonstrates a new way of searching for new particles.
One evening in August 2025, a Pakistani shepherd, Abuzar Hussain, was tending sheep and goats on the mountain slopes of Shijar. At about 6 p.m., a thunderous roar shattered the silence of the valley.
A new report from Google, Google DeepMind and M.I.T. finds that researchers are using AI—a lot. It’s just not helping as much in the lab
Researchers have engineered a new material that is an extreme thermal insulator, is exceptionally stiff and can be printed as a thin film at large scales. The material has one of the lowest thermal conductivity profiles of any dense, or nonporous, material—approaching the theoretical limit of how good a material can be as a thermal insulator.
As a kid growing up in North Carolina, Prakash Mishra was interested in planets. "My parents got me a telescope when I turned 6 or 7, and that was my personality for probably 10 years," he says, noting that he thought he would eventually study physics or astrophysics.
OpenAI’s claimed proof of the Navier-Stokes problem is a mathematical tour de force, but any real-world applications may be years away—if they ever arrive at all
Research from Queen Mary University of London explores how combining learner autonomy with student-led inquiry can create a more engaging and collaborative experience for international students learning academic English.
Magnetic reconnection is a process that occurs when the magnetic fields of a conductive plasma quickly rearrange and release massive amounts of stored magnetic energy. It is widely thought to be the underlying mechanism behind cosmic events such as solar flares and substorms in Earth's magnetosphere.
Each summer, researchers from Hokkaido University returned to the Qaanaaq Ice Cap in northwestern Greenland to measure changes in the ice surface using aluminum poles drilled into the ice. Their 13-year record shows how the ice cap changed from 2012 to 2025.
CRISPR may be a powerful technology for gene editing, but the system existed in bacteria long before scientists began using it. For billions of years, CRISPR has acted as a natural immune system in bacteria and other microbes, helping defend them against invading viruses. But now, two new studies, published in Science, describe a similar RNA-guided system that originated in the viruses themselves and appears to be a precursor to CRISPR.
Tariffs are usually debated as trade policy. But a study from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business treats them as something else: a mechanism for redistributing wealth.
Korean researchers have developed a method to strengthen biodegradable plastics using hemp hurd, an agricultural byproduct. The approach is expected to be applicable to other large-volume agricultural residues, including soybean stalks and rice straw.