Tom Vaughan, a photographer then living in Colorado’s Mancos Valley, kept a hummingbird feeder outside his house. One morning, he stepped through the portico door and noticed a black-chinned hummingbird dangling from the side of the red plastic feeder like a stray Christmas ornament.

CERN, the European nuclear physics research organization, is contemplating the development of a particle accelerator three times larger than the Large Hadron Collider that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a move intended to match growing Chinese ambitions in particle physics.

A remarkably preserved 49,000-year-old skeleton shows that Neanderthal kids may have grown slowly, like us

Canines don’t seem to perceive their reflections in mirrors. But they do better with a ‘smell mirror.’

One of Nasa’s “human computers”, who helped plan the mission that saw an American astronaut orbit the Earth for the first time, has opened a new research centre named in her honour. The key contribution of Katherine Johnson, 99, and other African-American women to the US space programme was recounted in the film Hidden Figures, which gave overdue recognition to their work. The film was the highest grossing Best Picture nominee at the Oscars.

Travelling by plane has become an everyday activity – but our bodies and brains are still affected by it.

It will enter clinical trials to prevent and treat the infection next year.

Stem cells can be coaxed to self-assemble into structures resembling human embryos.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered a most unusual exoplanet that absorbs 94% of the visible light given off by its host star, making it seem as if it is pitch-black in color, according to research published last week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. This unusual world, officially known as WASP-12b, is a “hot Jupiter” – a giant gas planet which orbits very closely to its sun and which is heated to extreme temperatures – NASA explained in a statement. In this case, its day side reaches temperatures of up to 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

The secret to climate-friendly cattle.

In an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson challenged former GM executive — and ardent climate denier — Bill Lutz to make a bet. “You take all the scientists who author these papers, get them to pool their money and invest in companies that would benefit from global warming,” Tyson said. “And take all the people who are in denial of global warming, take all their money and invest in companies that would presume there is no global warming. And I would predict [the climate deniers] will all go broke in the next 50 years.”

This week, all eyes are on Saturn and, more specifically, the Cassini spacecraft which circled the planet one last time before crashing into its murky surface on Friday. It left behind thousands of images, including some final shots like the photo of Saturn's clouds near the terminator, which is the boundary between night and day. It also took the awkwardly named "goodbye-kiss" image of Titan. The moon's gravity gave Cassini one final push around Saturn before its dramatic end.

For the first time ever, scientists have stored light-based information as sound waves on a computer chip - something the researchers compare to capturing lightning as thunder.

Scientists found the fungus Aspergillus tubingensis breaking down plastic in a rubbish dump in Islamabad, Pakistan.

An article on the neuroscience of infant consciousness, which attracted some interest a few years ago, asked: “When does your baby become conscious?” The premise, of course, was that babies aren’t born conscious but, instead, develop consciousness at some point. (According to the article, it is about five months of age). Yet, it is hard to think that there is nothing it feels like to be a newborn.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-sponsored Global Burden of Disease study is out.

Only recently did I work up the nerve to go to a diner or coffee shop alone. Even now, when I do, I'll sit there hunched over my sandwich or cup of tea and cast furtive glances at all the twosomes around me, knowing exactly what they're thinking: What. A. Loser. She can't even find someone to keep her company for half an hour?

John B. Goodenough, an emeritus professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, pioneered the lithium-ion battery technology that is now the industry standard, and now the 94-year-old is ready to push the envelope on battery innovation again. Goodenough along with senior research fellow Maria Helena Braga, lead a team of researchers who have developed a low-cost all-solid-state battery that is safer and more efficient than existing lithium-ion technology.

Fixing chronic back pain is possible only when patients understand how much it is produced by the brain, not the spine

The awards highlight research that encourages people to think in unusual ways. By Scott Malone.

After eight months of living in isolation on a remote Hawaii volcano, six NASA-backed research subjects will emerge from their Mars-like habitat on Sunday and return to civilization.

Researchers at International Business Machines Corp. have developed a new approach for simulating molecules on a quantum computer. The breakthrough, outlined in a research paper to be published in the scientific journal Nature Thursday, uses a technique that could eventually allow quantum computers to solve difficult problems in chemistry and electro-magnetism that cannot be solved by even the most powerful supercomputers today.

The Trump administration rejected a study from the Department of Health and Human Services showing refugees brought in $63 million than they cost for the government over the past decade. The New York Times reported Monday night the draft report showed refugees are not as costly as the administration often argues. Some within the administration didn't want the report to surface because it would go against the justification for President Trump possibly lowering the number of refugees admitted to the country next year, which he must announce by Oct. 1.

Scientists have successfully encoded a simple movie in bacteria DNA, and played it back. Using DNA for data storage is not as crazy as it sounds...

We are producing ever greater amounts of plastic – much of which ends up as garbage. What’s more, because plastic does not break down in the same way as other organic materials, it can persist in the environment over hundreds of years. Scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and the Kunming Institute of Botany in China have recently identified a fungus which could help deal with our waste problem by using enzymes to rapidly break down plastic materials.

The finding explains an ambiguity in lab work that led scientists to believe these rocks were much stronger than they appeared to be in the natural world. This new knowledge will help us understand how tectonic plates can break to form new boundaries. Study co-author Lars Hansen, Associate Professor of Rock and Mineral Physics in Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, said: 'The strength of tectonic plates has been a major target of research for the past four decades.

Historical evidence simply does not support such contentions. Indeed, it suggests that they are misguided. So why do they persist? The answers are political. By Peter Harrison.

very news story about cancer research should come with a health warning: believe the hope, but not the hype. Good headlines are quick and catchy, good science is steady steps taken on a complicated issue over a long time. If a new treatment is still being researched, it could be metaphorical miles and actual years away from getting into the hands or bodies of patients.

An enzyme that interferes with key memory-forming processes in people with Alzheimer's can now be specifically targeted thanks to the discovery of a protein that helps it do its dirty work, according to new research out of MIT.

They’re brighter, more stable, a little less clunky, and, for now, a steal.

ExxonMobil’s deliberate attempts to sow doubt on the reality and urgency of climate change and their donations to front groups to disseminate false information about climate change have been public knowledge for a long time, now. Investigative reports in 2015 revealed that Exxon had its own scientists doing its own climate modeling as far back as the 1970s: science and modeling that was not only accurate, but that was being used to plan for the company’s future.

The story sprang up all over the internet after the research was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. So were Vikings more progressive than first thought? Let's break it down.

Vibrations of a tiny cantilever could help reveal why quantum rules fail on large scales. By Emily Conover.

A group of scientists from Queen's University Belfast and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany have turned exoplanet-hunting on its head, in a study that instead looks at how an alien observer might be able to detect Earth using our own methods. They find that at least nine exoplanets are ideally placed to observe transits of Earth, in a new work published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Yet another U.S. agency has deleted climate change information from its ...