Explore the latest scientific discoveries, science news, breakthroughs and developments from around the world.
Before murdering Molly Ticehurst in April 2024, court documents show Daniel Billings had threatened to exploit the limits of policing in her country town: "I will come in the middle of the night … The police won't stop me. I will get to you quicker than they will."
Scientists are looking to diatoms, sea sponges, and plants for a cleaner way to recover rare earth elements and other valuable minerals hidden inside coal ash, red mud, and mine tailings. The bio-inspired approach could turn massive industrial waste piles into useful materials while reducing energy use, harsh chemicals, and reliance on new mining.
Sexual harassment between peers begins as early as Grade 4 and continues throughout lower secondary school. Most of those who sexually harass others have also experienced harassment themselves. These are among the findings of a doctoral thesis in psychology by Aziz-Kaan Dönmez from the University of Gothenburg, who studied peer sexual harassment among Swedish children and adolescents in Grades 4–9. Dönmez will defend his thesis on October 2.
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.