Research, discovery, and the natural world — explained clearly.
A five-person team has shown that percolation, the mathematical model behind wildfire spread and epidemic outbreaks, always undergoes an abrupt phase transition on a broad class of infinite networks, closing a question left open since the 1980s.
New research finds more than 40% of children under 10 worldwide already endure at least 20 additional days of dangerous humid heat each year because of human-caused climate change, more than any other age group.
New federal guidance says power plants built solely to run data centers do not have to follow Clean Air Act monitoring rules that apply to plants supplying the public grid. Critics say the change removes oversight just as huge gas plants are being proposed to feed America's AI boom.
A glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border triggered a flash flood that killed at least 165 people and left hundreds missing, including dozens of American pilgrims. It is the second such disaster on the same river system in just over a year.
A fossil misidentified as a crustacean for four decades has been reclassified as a stem-group insect, suggesting the move from water to land was gradual rather than sudden.
Underwater microphones and artificial intelligence have revealed the scale of illegal blast fishing in Indonesia's Coral Triangle, recording an explosion roughly every hour for more than a year.
Keiko Fujimori was sworn in as Peru's president in late July after a razor-thin election win. Environmentalists and Indigenous leaders fear her pro-mining, pro-oil agenda could harm the Amazon.
A new preprint examines why glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, can develop resistance to oncolytic viruses, an experimental therapy designed to kill tumour cells directly.
A major El Niño event that began around June 2026 is warming the Pacific faster than any comparable event in 45 years of satellite data, raising the odds that 2026 or 2027 becomes the hottest year on record.
The World Health Organization says the Democratic Republic of Congo will receive 70,000 doses of the Ervebo vaccine to combat what it calls the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreak on record, caused by a strain the vaccine was not originally designed to fight.
A Monash University researcher argues the family tree of early human relatives should be simplified, folding Australopithecus and Paranthropus into an expanded genus Homo. The proposal, published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, challenges decades-old classification rules.
The European Space Agency runs several structured programmes for students, graduates and early-career professionals seeking work in the space sector. Physics World has laid out how each pathway works and who qualifies.
A new analysis from the King's Fund finds obesity among English adults has doubled since 1993, reaching a record 30% in 2024, even after successive governments launched 14 separate strategies to curb it.
As cuckoos and swifts begin their autumn journey south from Britain, a new international scientific review warns that many migratory bird populations along the route they follow are shrinking fast.
A NASA research aircraft flew above heavy cloud off Iceland's coast to capture the sun's corona during Wednesday's total solar eclipse, after ground observers across Iceland and Spain faced poor visibility.
A 21-year survey of 53 European summits shows warmth-loving plants are spreading across the continent's high mountains, but researchers found local temperature rises alone cannot explain how fast this happens at any single site.
The Rhine has fallen to its lowest recorded flow as it enters the Netherlands, exposing riverbeds and grounding cargo ships. The government is now weighing bigger changes to how the country stores and shares fresh water.
A new theoretical study suggests gravitational waves could, in principle, be locked into stable, non-radiating patterns, an idea borrowed directly from photonics research on light.
German-led researchers report that bacteria and archaea, the two oldest branches of life, may have independently crossed the threshold into free-living cells roughly four billion years ago, even though both share a single ancient genetic code.
The ancient arthropod, whose blue blood underpins global vaccine safety testing, is among ten finalists in the Guardian's annual poll. Voting closes ahead of a result due on 17 August.
A newly analysed fossil of Chiniquodon theotonicus indicates this ancient relative of mammals gave birth to live young, pushing the origin of that trait back tens of millions of years.
Europe is heating up at roughly twice the global average rate, according to the EU's Copernicus climate service, and this summer's heatwaves have already caused thousands of excess deaths across the continent.
A total solar eclipse swept across the Arctic and into Spain on Wednesday, the only one of 2026, drawing crowds to watch the sky go dark. A partial eclipse was visible across much of Europe, North Africa and eastern North America.
A once-daily tablet called aleniglipron helped adults with obesity lose up to 12.1% of their body weight over 36 weeks, according to a mid-stage trial published in Nature Medicine. Unlike Wegovy or Ozempic, it does not require injection.
Researchers in Italy have separated 5,300-year-old microbes from modern contamination on the famous Alpine mummy, finding surviving gut bacteria and yeasts that may have travelled with him in the glacier for millennia.
Decades after Linus Pauling's high-dose vitamin C claims were discredited, researchers say intravenous vitamin C behaves like an experimental drug, not a supplement, and may help some cancer patients when combined with standard treatment.
A female Amur tiger named Umit has been released into a Kazakh nature reserve, marking the first practical step in a decade-long plan to restore a big cat population lost since the mid-20th century.
Researchers at the University of Chicago have observed electrons moving unusually slowly while staying quantum coherent in a thin magnetic material, a discovery that could inform future memory chips.
A four-week UK trial found adults who added a daily glass of 100% fruit juice or a smoothie to their diet reported lower depression scores than those who ate only whole fruit and vegetables. The study was small and industry-funded, researchers caution.
A vaccine candidate against Shigella, a leading cause of deadly diarrhoeal disease, prevented illness in 89% of vaccinated adults in a small trial. Researchers now want to test it in young children, who bear the heaviest burden of the disease.
Scientists have mapped roughly 6,000 cubic kilometres of magma hidden beneath southern Tuscany, a volume comparable to the reservoirs feeding supervolcanoes like Yellowstone. Researchers say the body poses no immediate danger but could reshape geothermal energy and critical mineral exploration in Italy.
A 12-week Canadian trial found that adults who ate three servings of full-fat dairy daily saw no rise in weight, body fat or cholesterol, and their blood pressure improved. The findings challenge decades of advice steering Europeans toward low-fat dairy.
A University of Toronto team has shown that photons passing through ultracold atoms can register a negative dwell time, and that the atoms themselves confirm the effect rather than it being a trick of the light pulse.
Satellite data show a broad current of molten iron deep inside Earth switched direction beneath the Pacific in 2010, defying decades of assumptions about the planet's interior. Researchers say the flow now appears to be weakening.
German researchers report that microbes living in flooded uranium mine water can turn toxic dissolved uranium into an unusually stable compound, removing about 95% of it within 130 days.
Fossil vertebrae feared destroyed in a 1989 museum move have turned up in Denmark. New analysis of the specimen supports estimates that the extinct megalodon shark grew beyond 24 metres and lived for close to a century.
After the US National Science Foundation rejected renewed funding for a 64-year marmot study, UCLA researchers turned to OnlyFans to raise money. The account, called OnlyMarms, is free and strictly G-rated.
On Wednesday 12 August 2026, a partial solar eclipse will be visible across the UK, Ireland and much of Europe. Here is how to view it without damaging your eyes.
Kyushu University researchers have shown that nanoscale droplets of garlic and spearmint compounds can kill a major stored-bean pest while sparing its natural predator and boosting seedling growth.
An estimated 18,000 Americans across 45 states have fallen ill in what is on track to be the largest Cyclospora outbreak in US history, linked to contaminated iceberg lettuce from Mexico. The parasite's unusual biology makes it exceptionally hard to detect, trace, and stop.
A new study links decades of uneven Pacific Ocean warming to sharply diverging wildfire trends in the United States Southwest and eastern Australia. The findings suggest that predicting future fire risk requires tracking long-term ocean shifts, not just rising air temperatures.
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A study from the University of Southern California has mapped a precise biological pathway by which the gut tells the brain what to remember. Early-life junk food diets blunt the same signalling circuit implicated in Alzheimer's disease.
A major US clinical trial has found that silver diamine fluoride, a liquid painted onto teeth in seconds, halted decay in more than half of treated baby teeth. The findings could finally push regulators to approve it as a formal cavity treatment.
Ray Williams, a propulsion test engineer who spent nearly three decades as a contractor at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, has been sworn in as a federal civil servant under the agency's drive to rebuild its internal technical workforce.
Simultaneous fires in France and Spain have triggered one of Europe's largest peacetime evacuations in decades, burning a combined area larger than any previous wildfire in Spanish history. A fresh surge in temperatures threatens to undo the fragile progress firefighters have made.
A week of record-breaking temperatures in June wiped £1.15 billion from the UK economy in lost output and stripped 24 million hours from the working week, according to new research from the London School of Economics and an Italian climate institute.
Physicists at CERN's CMS experiment have made the most precise measurement yet of a quantum asymmetry thought to explain why the universe contains matter at all. The results, drawn from three years of collider data, confirm the Standard Model but tighten the net around any hidden new physics.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved Lipfendra (enlicitide), a once-daily pill that cuts LDL cholesterol by up to 59%, ending a decades-long era in which this class of drug was available only by injection.
Teeth and jaw fragments from a Queensland fossil site have led scientists to propose a new marsupial order that may have lived on the continent for 35 million years. The lineage left no known descendants.
A seismic study of the world's largest underwater plateau has found that the colossal eruption that built it also chemically and structurally transformed the oceanic plate beneath it, overturning assumptions about how Earth's tectonic plates form and evolve.
Researchers at the City College of New York have published a landmark review in Nature Materials, mapping how atomically thin magnetic semiconductors allow light and magnetism to interact in ways that were previously unachievable.
Scientists in Vienna have formally proposed a new category of natural material, dubbed "bio-metals", after studying the metal-reinforced jaws of a common marine bristle worm. The findings, could guide the design of tough, lightweight materials produced without industrial forges or furnaces.
A Jupiter-sized exoplanet has been found orbiting a dead star just 80 light-years from Earth, and new James Webb Space Telescope data now explain how it survived. The findings, published in Nature, offer humanity's clearest look yet at the long-term fate of planetary systems, including our own.
New satellite maps and recent drilling expeditions have revealed a continent beneath the continent: mountains as tall as the Alps, more than 400 liquid lakes, and microbial life sealed in darkness for millions of years. The discoveries are reshaping how scientists model sea-level rise.
Anthropic has released Claude Science, an AI workbench that unifies scientific databases, code execution, and computing infrastructure in a single environment. The platform, now in beta for paying subscribers, is aimed squarely at computational biology and pharmaceutical research.
A major new study has identified three times more climate-resilient coral reef than previously known, spanning 71 countries and offering governments a precise map for conservation priorities. The findings, arrive as a potentially powerful El Niño threatens to trigger mass bleaching events worldwide.
Three Brazilian sisters aged 103, 104, and 109 — certified by Guinness as the oldest living sibling trio on Earth — are now at the centre of a University of São Paulo study probing the genetic roots of extreme old age.