Official Xinhua news agency says preliminary investigations revealed that scientist had acted on his own and forged review papers

Romeo was made for love, as all animals are. But for years he couldn’t find it. It’s not like there was anything wrong with Romeo. Sure he’s shy, eats worms, lacks eyelashes and is 10 years old, at least. But he’s aged well, and he’s kind of a special guy. Romeo is a Sehuencas water frog, once thought to be the last one on the planet. He lives alone in a tank at the Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d’Orbigny in Bolivia.

Early humans were still swinging from trees two million years ago, scientists have said, after confirming a set of contentious fossils represents a "missing link" in humanity's family tree. The fossils of Australopithecus sediba have fueled scientific debate since they were found at the Malapa Fossil Site in South Africa 10 years ago. And now researchers have established that they are closely linked to the Homo genus, representing a bridging species between early humans and their predecessors, proving that early humans were still swinging from trees 2 million years ago.

A rare condition called reverse-slope hearing loss makes the sufferer unable to hear low frequencies, including most men’s voices. Ms Chen from Xiamen on China’s east coast woke to find she couldn’t hear her boyfriend talking. The previous evening she had reportedly experienced nausea and ringing in her ears.

A strange space object called Oumuamua has been a topic of debate among scientists and astronomers, with one Israeli Harvard professor claiming it is likely an alien probe.

Underwater robot has delivered over 100k baby corals in attempt to restore part of the Great Barrier Reef

A scientist at NASA animated how long it takes light to travel around Earth, to the moon, and to Mars. The movies show just how slow light can be.

Algorithms are increasingly being used to make ethical decisions. Perhaps the best example of this is a high-tech take on the ethical dilemma known as the trolley problem: if a self-driving car cannot stop itself from killing one of two pedestrians, how should the car’s control software choose who live and who dies?

Moderate earthquakes aren’t releasing enough stress along the region’s faults. They’re actually making it worse.

Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her identical twin sister, Carly, bought DNA ancestry kits from five of the most popular companies in the industry. Find out why some of the results they received left a team of computational biologists at Yale University baffled.

On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as “a red and extremely elongated asteroid.” It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it ‘Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined ‘Oumuamua’s “peculiar acceleration” and suggested that the object...

Human beings can configure their faces in thousands and thousands of ways to convey emotion, but only 35 expressions actually get the job done across cultures, a new study has found. And while our faces can convey a multitude of emotions—from anger to sadness to riotous joy—the number of ways our faces can convey different emotions varies. Disgust, for example, needs just one facial expression to get its point across throughout the world.

Cern has published its ideas for a £20bn successor to the Large Hadron Collider, given the working name of Future Circular Collider (FCC). The Geneva based particle physics research centre is proposing an accelerator that is almost four times longer and ten times more powerful. The aim is to have the FCC hunting for new sub-atomic particles by 2050. Critics say that the money could be better spent on other research areas such as combating climate change.

Geneticists have begun using old bones to make sweeping claims about the distant past. But their revisions to the human story are making some scholars of prehistory uneasy.

Since 2013, Kristina Olson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has been running a large, long-term study to track the health and well-being of transgender children—those who identify as a different gender from the one they were assigned at birth. Since the study’s launch, Olson has also heard from the parents of gender-nonconforming kids, who consistently defy gender stereotypes but have not socially transitioned.

Earth's north magnetic pole is on the move, unpredictably lurching away from the Canadian Arctic and toward Siberia. It's wandered so much, that the current representation of the entire globe's magnetic field, just updated in 2015, is now out of date. And so, geologists have come up with a new model. This updated model, called the World Magnetic Model, was supposed to be published Jan. 15, but it's now been delayed to Jan. 30, on account of the government shutdown.

The head of Harvard University's Astronomy Department is doubling down on his claim from November 2018 that the space rock Oumuamua, the first interstellar object to enter our solar system, which it did in 2017, was an alien probe. Dr. Avi Loeb was interviewed by Haaretz about his controversial claim, which was made in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Co-author and Harvard astrophysicist Shmuel Bialy had stated, “Currently there is an unexplained phenomena, namely, the excess acceleration of Oumuamua...

Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson has been stripped of his honorary titles after repeating comments about race and intelligence. In a TV programme, the pioneer in DNA studies made a reference to a view that genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said the 90-year-old scientist's remarks were "unsubstantiated and reckless".

Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific, controversial new research suggests—and quite possibly even racist. How did we get it so wrong?

A researcher claims that identity theft was at play in the case of Jeanne Calment, the world’s oldest person, but experts say that evidence is weak.

New research explores invisible, force-carrying beams projecting from the eyes. Princeton University researchers recently published a whimsical study that explores why people subconsciously treat the focus of someone’s gaze as a force-carrying beam projected by the eyes. It’s not a coincidence that this sounds like the stuff of sci-fi or Marvel Comics.

Saplings from clones of the world's largest and longest-lived trees, felled for timber more than a century ago, could be key to fighting climate change.

The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can’t be explained by natural selection alone — so how did it come to be?

Scientists are starting to explore the connection between the uterus, the ovaries, and the brain to better understand how removing these organs can impact a person’s health.

The Bootstrap Paradox is a theoretical paradox of time travel that occurs when an object or piece of information sent back in time becomes trapped within an infinite cause-effect loop in which the item no [...]

One day in the distant future, a team of intrepid humans might board a starship and set out for a world beyond our solar system — maybe one of the exoplanets of Alpha Centauri, the nearby star system. One place we'll never set foot on is Kelt-9b. In addition to being a gas giant without a solid surface, Kelt-9b lies hundreds of light-years away and is the hottest planet ever observed. Temperatures on its outer layer can exceed 4,000 degrees Celsius (7,000 degrees Fahrenheit) — hotter than some stars — and a new study shows that its superheated atmosphere contains vaporized heavy metals.

In the 1960s, the sugar industry funded research that downplayed the risks of sugar and highlighted the hazards of fat, according to a newly published article in JAMA Internal Medicine. The article draws on internal documents to show that an industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation wanted to "refute" concerns about sugar's possible role in heart disease. The SRF then sponsored research by Harvard scientists that did just that.

One of the last acts of NASA's Cassini spacecraft before its death plunge into Saturn's hydrogen and helium atmosphere was to coast between the planet and its rings and let them tug it around, essentially acting as a gravity probe. Precise measurements of Cassini's final trajectory have now allowed scientists to make the first accurate estimate of the amount of material in the planet's rings, weighing them based on the strength of their gravitational pull.

In an ironic twist, the mammals also dine on carcasses of their main predator, the Canada lynx, a new study says.

The universe is far from homogenous. Rather, stars, and the galaxies that contain them, clump together in some places, brought together by their shared gravitational attraction. Astronomers have historically found clusters of galaxies in the sky to be relatively easy to spot, as they’re extremely large and bright. But one new study suggests that a third of all galaxy clusters have been hiding undiscovered out in the cosmos.

Today, astronomers have numerous extrasolar systems to study, but most look very different from our own. Determining how these solar systems — and ours — formed is challenging. New research presented at the 233rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, on January 8 lends credence to an idea that goes against previous thoughts about planet formation, but has been gaining traction in the field...

One of the most cherished science fiction scenarios is using a black hole as a portal to another dimension or time or universe. That fantasy may be closer to reality than previously imagined. Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in the universe. They are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity – which happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point yielding an object with infinite density.

As we age, our bodies undergo biological changes that cause a decline in the function of our cells and tissues. However, most studies attempting to identify molecules involved age-related dysfunctions have focused only on mechanisms based on mRNA transcription, a very important step in gene expression, but nonetheless only part of the complex regulatory mechanisms in our cells.

The U.S. government may be in partial shutdown mode, but operations to configure instruments critical to NASA’s InSight mission on Mars are right on schedule—and things are going swimmingly, as the latest mission update attests. Our last update from the InSight mission came on December 20 following the probe’s successful deployment of the SEIS instrument, or Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, onto the Martian surface. The configuration of this hexagonal-shaped device is still ongoing, but an update from the SEIS team shows things are proceeding as planned.

Tweaks to the tomato’s genes could turn it into a spicy one-stop shop for the salsa of the future, Popular Science reports. Shared ancestry with hot peppers, such as the jalapeno, gives the mild-mannered tomato all the genetic tools needed to set the human mouth ablaze. Scientists outline two genetic pathways to turn tomatoes spicy in new research published this week in Trends in Plant Science. The motivation for turning up the heat on the tomato isn’t just culinary.