Before dawn on April 4, 1994, Abigail Alling and Mark Van Thillo slipped across the foothills of Arizona’s Santa Catalina Mountains. They made their way to a looming monument of geodesic domes and pyramids known as Biosphere 2. The three-acre complex contained a miniature rain forest, a mangrove, a desert and a coral reef — along with seven people who had been sealed inside for a month. Ms. Alling and Mr. Van Thillo had recently emerged from a two-year stay in Biosphere 2.

Scientist and science vlogger Kurtis Baute set out to prove that the world is round with a simple, yet strenuous experiment using two sticks, an orange and a long straight bicycle ride along a very flat road between Regina and Stoughton in Saskatchewan, Canada. Baute also set up sundials at each location, putting an even finer point on his results with some help from Casey at the Saskatchewan Science Center.

AutoDraw is a new kind of drawing tool that pairs the magic of machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help everyone create anything visual, fast.

I was stuck on a listless 6 train in NYC, 50ft underground, holding on to a gallon jug of water I'd been carrying all day. It was the most intense pressure my bladder has ever been under, the hardest I've ever had to pee in my entire life. Such is the kidney-popping life you lead when you are drinking glass after glass after glass of H2O. When I agreed to drink a gallon of water a day, every day, for a month -- or, what is commonly known as the "Water Gallon Challenge"...

On a press call this afternoon, NASA and its research partners discussed several science experiments headed to orbit with the next ISS resupply mission. The space agency covered a host of interesting topics, including 3D printing, micrometeorite studies, and robotic grippers for hoisting objects onto walls. And then, the bombshell: NASA would like to light a “large scale fire” in space.

Round two of the Martian farming experiment at Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands has proven more successful than the last. This week, researchers announced a bountiful harvest from soil designed to mimic the makeup of Martian soil. Harvested crops included tomatoes, peas, rye, garden rocket, radish and garden cress. Scientists said lessons learned during round one allowed for greater success...

The “wineglass harp” is a classic demonstration of two phenomena: resonance, and why you don’t take young kids to nice restaurants. But with a few simple materials, you can perform a neat new take on this classic experiment at home (and without disrupting anyone’s dinner conversation!)

Physicist Andreas Wahl would feel truly at home among the world’s dying breed of “mad scientists.” He wanted to demonstrate some Newtonian laws of circular motion and how objects with a centripetal force, which forces traveling objects to follow a curved path, accelerate as they approach a central point. However, sterile laboratories with little pulleys and weights don’t quite do it justice. Instead, it seems hanging 14 meters (46 feet) off...

Fans of "The Jetsons" may see shades of the robotic maid Rosie as this Atlas humanoid robot attempts various cleaning tasks. The video, from robotics company IHMC, is shown at 20x speed so you don't have to wait for the slow-moving bot to get into position. But just because Atlas can do it doesn't mean it's easy. Someone has to control its movements, double-check its hand positions when picking something up, and make sure it doesn't fall...

The world's most sensitive detector for dark matter — the mysterious stuff thought to make up 85% of matter in the Universe — was inaugurated on 11 November under the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy. If the experiment, called XENON1T, finds dark matter, it will enter the history books. Meanwhile a failure to do so, say many theorists, would go a long way to ruling out a popular candidate for the elusive substance — a type of weakly interacting massive...

If you’re on the east coast tonight, keep an eye on the sky between 7pm and 9pm: NASA is launching a test of some new tech that will include releasing colorful vapor tracers 130 miles above the Earth. It sounds like it’s going to be beautiful. The vapors will be ejected from a sounding rocket launched from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. NASA explains that it has actually been injecting various vapor tracers into the atmosphere...

Dutch scientists are making waves—big ones. A new experimental facility at Deltares, a research institute here, has begun producing the largest humanmade waves in the world. Like kids building sandcastles below the tideline on the beach, scientists will let the walls of water crash on dikes of different designs and other structures—sometimes until they're destroyed.

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The skin, like a cloak, covers us all over, the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient of protectors. The whole body is covered by skin. Even the transparent cornea of the eye is overlain by a layer of modified skin. The skin also turns inwards to line orifices such as the mouth, nostrils, and anal canal. In the evolution of the senses the sense of touch was undoubtedly the first to come into being. Touch is the parent of our eyes.

Subatomic particles have been found that appear to defy the Standard Model of particle physics. The team working at Cern's Large Hadron Collider have found evidence of leptons decaying at different rates, which could possibly point to some undiscovered forces. Publishing their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team from the University of Maryland had been searching for conditions and behaviours that do not fit with the Standard Model.

I was toying around with the idea of multivariate beer, where the ingredients varied by county demographics. Could I taste the difference? Here's how the experiment went.

The NOvA detector has seen its first neutrino oscillations.

On 3 June this year, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN began delivering particle collisions at an energy 63% higher than previously acheived. This week in Vienna, first physics results were presented. Here are some highlights.

Science's 10 Most Beautiful Physics Experiments