Technology

With a high-speed camera and a tiny guillotine, scientists showed that chopping onions slowly and with sharper knives cuts down on tears.

Australia’s tropical forests are the world’s first to flip a worrisome switch. The forests are now putting more carbon into the atmosphere than they are taking out, researchers report in the Oct. 16 Nature. That switch is a…

Glioblastoma doesn't just affect the brain. It also erodes bones in the skull and changes the composition of immune cells in skull marrow.

In a first, a scientific conference welcomed paper submissions from any area of science, but with one catch: AI had to do most of the work. Called Agents4Science 2025, the Oct. 22 virtual event focused on the work of artificial…

DNA from Napoleonic soldiers’ teeth uncovered two fever-causing bacteria that may have worsened the army’s fatal retreat from Russia.

Some vipers are the sprinters of snakes. Vipers wielded the fastest attacks in a comparison of 36 venomous snakes from three families, researchers report October 23 in Journal of Experimental Biology. And the quickest vipers…

A ridge of rocks in New Mexico holds a snapshot of a dinosaur heyday. Fossils of crested hadrosaurs, long-necked sauropods and a variety of plants all point to a flourishing ecosystem. New dating of the rocks now reveals this…

Subterranean mosquitoes specialized for life in subways and sewers first evolved to pester humans millennia ago in Mediterranean civilizations. A widely accepted story about the mosquitoes’ evolution put their origins in the…

The world’s most prized coffee comes from partially digested beans pooped out by the Asian palm civet. Now, researchers are delving into why this “civet coffee” is so tasty. New chemical analyses of beans collected from civet…

The vessel rolled in the swell as fishers pulled huge nets bursting with tuna onto the deck then poured the catch down a loading hatch. But Melissa Cronin wasn’t there for the tuna. She was looking for ways to save manta and…

Google says its quantum computer achieved a verifiable calculation that classic computers cannot. The work could point to future applications.

Painful experience has taught Erika Moore that benign doesn’t always mean harmless. Moore, a biomedical engineer at the University of Maryland in College Park, lives with noncancerous tumors in the uterus called uterine fibroids.…

Australia’s First Peoples were more early paleontologists than extinction-driving butchers, a group of scientists argue. For decades, the debate over whether the first humans to inhabit present-day Australia contributed to the…

At an effective temperature of 13 million kelvins, the jiggling glass sphere could help scientists understand physics at the microscale.

Using a scratch-and-sniff test, researchers discovered that smell loss after COVID-19 may linger for more than two years.

Duping a guppy is easier than duping a ring dove — at least when it comes to a classic optical illusion.   In the Ebbinghaus illusion, two identical circles placed side by side are each framed by a set of either smaller or…

Ultra-endurance athletes triumph over staggering distances and harsh conditions. But one of their toughest foes may be their own metabolic ceiling. By scrutinizing a group of top-tier long-haul athletes, scientists have now…

Editor in Chief Nancy Shute explores the science behind major questions on food and health — from the addictive potential of ultraprocessed foods to the high-protein diet craze to the drawbacks of keto.

Citations A. Topiwala et al. Alcohol use and risk of dementia in diverse populations: evidence from cohort, case-control and Mendelian randomization approaches. BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. Posted September 23, 2025. doi:…

Carly Kay is the Fall 2025 science writing intern at Science News. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a master’s degree in science communication from the University…

Bright flecks of burning wood stream through the smoky air and toward a hapless house. Before the one-story structure, the glowing specks, each merely centimeters in size, seem insignificant. But each lofted ember is a seed of…

Tens of thousands of preschool-aged children in the Gaza Strip haven’t had nearly enough to eat, putting their young lives at grave risk. A 20-month study of wasting among young children living in the Gaza Strip estimates that,…

Many science fiction and fantasy stories are enveloped in a warm glow, and it’s not just because of nostalgia. Some characters literally glow — from ET’s fingertip to the demon markings in this year’s hit movie K-Pop Demon…

A telltale hint was on the bee’s knees. An analysis of 127 fossil flowers, flower buds and bees from central Germany revealed pollen particles that precisely matched ancient flowers to their pollinators. The fossils date to…

Newly discovered African fossils lend a hand to suspicions that an ancient hominid outside our own genus, Homo, made and used stone and bone tools. Partial remains of a roughly 1.5-million-year-old Paranthropus boisei…

Chicago’s viral ‘Rat Hole’ is less rat splat, more squirrel squish. Researchers determined it was probably a squirrel that left a rodent-shaped impression in the concrete of the Windy City. Their new study, published October 15…

The Water RemembersAmy Bowers CordalisLittle Brown & Co., $30In September 2002, an estimated 34,000 to 78,000 adult Chinook salmon died in the Klamath River within the Yurok Reservation in Northern California. The U.S.…

By weaving Kevlar or polyethylene nanofibers into standard neoprene in wetsuits, researchers found ways to limit injury during rare encounters with sharks.

650-Year-Old Treasure Nests: Spain's Centry Old Treasure Nests: Scientists in Spain have discovered 12 ancient nests once inhabited by the Bearded Vulture (Gypaetus barbatus), a bone-eating bird of prey that disappeared from the region…

Earth has entered a grim new climate reality. The planet has officially passed its first climate tipping point. Relentlessly rising heat in the oceans has now pushed corals around the world past their limit, causing an…