Science

The idea that aliens may have visited the Earth is becoming increasingly popular. Around a fifth of UK citizens believe Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, and an estimated 7% believe that they have seen a UFO.

The figures are even higher in the US – and rising. The number of people who believe UFO sightings offer likely proof of alien life increased from 20% in 1996 to 34% in 2022. Some 24% of Americans say they’ve seen a UFO.

Nestled between mountains in a secluded corner of West Virginia, a giant awakens: the Green Bank Telescope begins its nightly vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets.

If intelligent life exists beyond Earth, there's a good chance the teams analyzing the data from the world's largest, fully steerable radio astronomy facility will be the first to know.

About 2,890 kilometers beneath our feet lies a gigantic ball of liquid metal: our planet’s core. Scientists like me use the seismic waves created by earthquakes as a kind of ultrasound to “see” the shape and structure of the core.

Using a new way of studying these waves, my colleague Xiaolong Ma and I have made a surprising discovery: there is a large donut-shaped region of the core around the Equator, a few hundred kilometres thick, where seismic waves travel about 2% slower than in the rest of the core.

Optical illusions, quantum mechanics and neural networks might seem to be quite unrelated topics at first glance. However, in new research I have used a phenomenon called “quantum tunnelling” to design a neural network that can “see” optical illusions in much the same way humans do.

My neural network did well at simulating human perception of the famous Necker cube and Rubin’s vase illusions – and in fact better than some much larger conventional neural networks used in computer vision.

Hundreds of endangered Australian Green and Golden Bell frogs huddle inside a sauna, shielded from Sydney's winter chill.

The sauna -– a small greenhouse containing black-painted bricks warmed by the sun -- may be pleasant, but it also protects the frogs from a deadly chytrid fungus that would otherwise drive them to extinction.

Naming others is considered a marker of highly advanced cognition in social animals, previously observed only in humans, bottlenose dolphins and African elephants.

Marmoset monkeys have now joined this exclusive club, according to a new study published in Science on Thursday.

Mammals, from the mighty blue whale to the tiny shrew, inhabit nearly every corner of our planet. Their remarkable adaptability to different environments has long fascinated scientists, with each species developing unique traits to survive and thrive.

Despite such vast biological diversity, it was believed until recently that the structure and function of the heart across mammals was the same. But research from my colleagues and I reveals that the human heart is an outlier, distinctly different from those of our closest relatives, the great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas.

As we grieve the loss of a pet, we may not be the only ones feeling the pain. Research is showing that cats who are left behind when another animal in their home dies could be mourning along with us.

Grief is a well-documented human response to loss – but its roots may be far more ancient as some scientists believe it evolved in extinct species of humans. Corvids – members of the crow family – primates, and marine mammals like dolphins and whales, have all been observed to change their behaviour when one of their own dies, from carrying dead offspring for days, to staying close by the body, as if keeping vigil.

In 2005, I was navigating winding roads through the Drakensberg Mountains, in Lesotho, Southern Africa. Towering cliff-like features known as escarpments interrupt the landscape, rising up by a kilometer or more. Taken aback by the dramatic scenery, I was struck by a question: how on Earth did it form?

The outer shell of our planet is fractured into seven or eight major sections, or tectonic plates, on which the continents sit. We expect to see the continents rise up at the active boundaries of these plates, where volcanism and earthquakes are often concentrated.

The FDA has approved an updated covid shot for everyone 6 months old and up, which renews a now-annual quandary for Americans: Get the shot now, with the latest covid outbreak sweeping the country, or hold it in reserve for the winter wave?

The new vaccine should provide some protection to everyone. But many healthy people who have already been vaccinated or have immunity because they’ve been exposed to covid enough times may want to wait a few months.

The conditions within a person’s home, family and community affect their ability to stay healthy. Scientists studying these social determinants of health are trying to understand whether nature or nurture has a stronger effect on a person’s ability to fight disease.

I am a developmental physiologist studying the ways that drinking affects fetal development and lifelong health. Although researchers have long recognized that a father’s alcohol abuse negatively affects his children’s mental health and social development, it hasn’t been clear if paternal drinking has any lasting biological effects on his offspring’s physical health.

A person in the northeastern U.S. state of New Hampshire has died after contracting the rare mosquito-borne eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) virus, health authorities announced Tuesday.

The patient, identified only as an adult from the town of Hampstead, was hospitalized with severe central nervous system disease and later succumbed to the illness, the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) said in a statement.

SpaceX on Tuesday postponed once more its attempt at launching a daring orbital expedition featuring an all-civilian crew that is aiming to carry out the first-ever spacewalk by private citizens.

The Polaris Dawn mission, organized by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, had been set to lift off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a four-hour window early Wednesday.