Science And Sciencibility

Sunbirds (Nectariniidae) drink nectar from flowers by generating suction with their tongues — the first example of a vertebrate creating suc...

For the first time, physicists have matched detailed quantum-computer simulations to experimental data gathered from work with solid materia...

Researchers have identified the earliest known dog genomes, which push the genetic record for dogs back by more than 5,000 years. They recov...

After decades of research, physicists are confident that the first tick of a ‘nuclear clock’ is imminent. This device would keep time by mea...

An archæological site that overturned the history of humans in South America might just do it again. Radiocarbon dating pegged artefacts fro...

A newly described species of ‘magic mushroom’ could upend a popular theory of when psychedelic fungi popped up around the world. Researchers...

Researchers have created a 3D simulation that models DNA replication, cell division and nearly every chemical reaction in a living bacterial...

Chemists have synthesised a new type of carbon-based molecule with an unprecedented twist in its structure. The team calls the looped molec...

Around 1590, Galileo Galilei filled the margins of a copy of Ptolemy’s The Almagest with his musings — and they have just been rediscovered....

Chemical evidence from ancient crystals suggests that Earth’s tectonic plates had already started moving 3.3 billion years ago, relatively e...

Researchers have found ways to turn fluorescent-protein labels — coloured tags used to track the inner workings of a cell — into qubits, the...

Genetic evidence from three Neanderthal ( Homo neanderthalensis ) specimens suggests female Homo sapiens and male Neanderthals mated more o...

A series of notches carved on a piece of mammoth ivory roughly 40,000 years ago could be an early ancestor of cuneiform, one of the oldest-k...

Fresh evidence from rocks in China is contributing to debate about what caused the ‘Great Unconformity’ — a one-billion-year gap in the geol...

Researchers at Microsoft have created a data-storage system that can remain readable for at least 10,000 years — and probably much longer. T...

Scientists have identified a giant virus that can hijack a host cell’s protein-making machinery to churn out copies of itself — the first ex...

A fossilised skull dated to more than 300 million years ago has been identified as belonging to Tyrannoroter heberti , a newly described ‘mi...

Ancient genomic data has revealed that inhabitants of the Rhine-Meuse river delta — wetland and coastal areas of modern-day Netherlands, Bel...

Researchers say they have figured out the rules of an ancient Roman board game. The team simulated thousands of turns based on more than 100...

Young chacma baboons ( Papio ursinus ) vie for their mother’s attention more often when she’s grooming one of their siblings than when she’s...

The black hole at the centre of our galaxy might actually be a huge blob of dark matter, suggest astrophysicists. A super-dense core of suba...

When will artificial intelligence systems achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), when defined as the ability to convincingly imitate...

Wooden objects carrying the marks of carving and use could be the oldest wooden tools ever found. Researchers dated the artefacts, found in ...

Larvae of the European blister beetle ( Meloe proscarabaeus ) mimic the scent of flowers to find a ride to their next meal. The larvae produ...

In the iconic quantum double-slit experiment, a photon acts like a wave and interferes with itself — illustrating the mind-boggling concept ...

The outline of a hand discovered in an Indonesian cave has been dated to at least 67,800 years ago — the oldest known example of cave art in...

Some gifted dogs can learn words for hundreds of objects and pick up new ones just by listening in to the conversations of human family memb...

Pottery made by people of the Halafian culture, who inhabited northern Mesopotamia between around 6200 and 5500 BC, is painted with flowers ...

A genomic analysis of around 14,400-year-old woolly rhino ( Coelodonta antiquitatis ) tissue — recovered from the stomach of an ice age wolf...

For more than a century, Archaeopteryx was the earliest known bird genus, and the only one known from the Jurassic period, when birds first...

Traces of toxic compounds have been found on 60,000-year-old arrowheads, providing the oldest chemical evidence that Palaeolithic hunter-gat...

The exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b is a place of unimaginable weirdness. It takes just 7.8 hours to orbit its star, which is an ultra-dense pulsa...

Baked soil, ancient tools and materials that could be used to start fires show that Neanderthals were making fire in the UK 400,000 years ag...

Orcas and Pacific white-sided dolphins have been spotted working together to hunt. The dolphins seem to act as ‘scouts’ to help find Chinook...

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient Egyptian pleasure boat buried off the coast of Alexandria. Researchers estimate that the 35-metre-...

A worker ant pupa ( Lasius neglectus ) that’s infected with a fungus will send out a chemical alarm that it must be destroyed to contain the...

A newly discovered amoeba ( Incendiamoeba cascadensis ) can thrive at temperatures up to 64 °C — hotter than any other known complex cell. R...

Researchers have sequenced the whole genomes of more than 100 individual cells from one 74-year-old man to reveal a full picture of the gene...

The first plants to get a foothold on land are a mystery, because there are few fossils — except for Spongiophyton . But the enigmatic lifef...

Pigeons ( Columba livia ) seem to be able to sense magnetic fields by detecting tiny electrical currents in their inner ears. Researchers pe...

Researchers have found the oldest RNA molecules to date in mummified woolly mammoth tissue. RNA is a fragile molecule, which makes intact an...

At a company on the shores of Lake Geneva, clumps of living brain cells are waiting for your call. These blobs, about the size of a grain of...

In the first test image from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, astronomers have spotted a ‘tail’ on the galaxy Messier 61 — a thread o...

A technique called ‘mind captioning’ generates descriptive sentences of what a person is seeing or picturing in their mind using scans of th...

Scientists have described a ‘superflare’ from a distant black hole — the most luminous burst of light ever detected from such an object. At ...

A shape called a ‘noperthedron’ — a faceted ball made of 150 triangles and two regular 15-sided polygons — is the first to break a long-stan...

A fossil once assumed to be of a young Tyrannosaurus rex is in fact that of a fully grown adult of a different species altogether. The speci...

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots trained on ‘brain rot’ content — vapid social media posts that are the equivalent of mental junk food ...