It had been hiding in plain sight. The original letter — long thought lost — in which Galileo Galilei first set down his arguments against the church’s doctrine that the Sun orbits the Earth has been discovered in a misdated library catalogue in London. Its unearthing and analysis expose critical new details about the saga that led to the astronomer’s condemnation for heresy in 1633.

Decades spent studying peer review, publication bias, and more have challenged the status quo, but journalologists say they have a long way to go

The latest entree to join the Army’s roster of M.R.E. field rations is a Sicilian-style slice that stays fresh for years and took decades to develop.

We love to categorize ourselves and others into personality types. Maybe you’re a “Type A.” Or maybe the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, versions of which many have taken on Facebook, labels you a “Protector” (ISFJ). But how distinct are these types? Is everyone clearly Type A or Type B, with no one in between? Or do people fall on a spectrum? If there’s a spectrum, are there two clumps with a few people between, or one clump in the middle with a few people at the extremes?

Hugging is a particularly intimate and intense way to express emotions. Through a hug we can convey joy or sorrow, we can say to a person that can count on us unconditionally and understand his state of mind without speaking. But the fact is that embraces not only help us connect with others and express what we feel, also have a very positve effect on the emotional balance and brain health.

​Diets like intermittent fasting are proving wildly popular for their rapid weight-loss effects, but scientists are also starting to uncover how they might benefit the body in other ways. A molecule produced during fasting has now been found to apply the brakes to aging of the vascular system.

Physicists took a deeper look at the Leidenfrost effect, which you’ve likely experienced when you’ve dripped water into a pan to test its temperature.

A study in mice hints at a new approach for thwarting neurodegenerative diseases—but many questions remain.

Targeted engineering projects to hold off glacier melting could slow down the collapse of ice sheets and limit sea-level rise, according to a new study published in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere. While an intervention similar in size to existing large civil engineering projects could only have a 30% chance of success, a larger project would have better odds of holding off ice-sheet collapse. But study authors Michael Wolovick and John Moore caution that reducing emissions still remains key to stopping climate change and its dramatic effects.

The universe is filled with billions of massive celestial objects, from stars to planets to comets to asteroids. But what happens when lines start to blur between these classifications, and we just can’t place an object in any major category? Well, brown dwarfs know this better than anyone. They’re far too massive to be planets, but not massive enough for hydrogen atoms to fuse in their cores and become stars.

A trio of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and Canada has found evidence that suggests nuclear material beneath the surface of neutron stars may be the strongest material in the universe. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, M. E. Caplan, A. S. Schneider, and C. J. Horowitz describe their neutron star simulation and what it showed.

A new paper has taken a ingenious route towards treating cocaine addicted mice – by developing a CRISPR-powered skin grafts that produce an anti-cocaine enzyme.

From making biofuels to eating up harmful plastics, fungi could help us build a greener planet. Fungi could not just help rid the planet of plastic by degrading it, but by making it obsolete it, too. Research in the Kew report suggests that naturally made materials using fungal mycelia are being used increasingly often instead of more harmful materials such as polystyrene and leather.

Humans looking back on this period of history in future will be astonished by the huge amount of plastic this generation left behind – because rubbish waste is now so prolific it will become fossilised, a scientist has said. Dr Dan Parsons, professor of sedimentology at Hull University, says that it is inevitable there will be a record of the thousands of tonnes of plastic waste we generate as microplastics are already seeping into the earth and into the food chain.

Scientists agree that the story of the universe began 13.8 billion years ago, when everything — all the matter and energy and even space itself — emerged from the extraordinarily hot, dense cauldron known as the Big Bang. But ask a scientist what came before that first moment, and you’re likely to get a shrug. To many, thinking about a time before the beginning of time makes no sense.

Just a cosmic hop, skip and jump away, an Earth-size planet orbits the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet—known as Proxima Centauri b—in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of sustaining life. Now, using computer models similar to those used to study climate change on Earth, researchers have found that, under a wide range of conditions...

History and literature are filled with warnings about the danger of seeking eternal life. But in the latest episode of Crazy/Genius, some scientists say that a dramatic expansion of human lifespans is within reach.

Those who take on the global industry that traps research behind paywalls are heroes, not thieves, says George Monbiot

A space observatory at the centre of swirling alien conspiracy theories has asked for “patience” as it continues to be locked down. The Sunspot Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico caught the attention of the world when it was shut down by FBI agents who reportedly swooped on the facility after arriving in elite Blackhawk helicopters. It led immediately to suggestions the advanced technology inside of the facility spotted something it shouldn’t – such as proof of extraterrestrials, UFOs or even some baseless speculation that the observatory had spotted that the sun has started dying.

NASA has released the first image from its new space telescope. TESS, short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is helping scientists detect and study new planets in other solar systems. The telescope launched in April on a SpaceX rocket, and on July 25, TESS slipped into a unique orbit between Earth and the moon. The telescope is now scanning the night sky, staring down distant solar systems, and hunting for small, rocky, Earth-like planets.

A strange thing has happened to men over the past few decades: We've become increasingly infertile, so much so that within a generation we may lose the ability to reproduce entirely.

As a type of immune cell, it has always been considered one of the good guys. But in a stunning breakthrough in schizophrenia research, scientists say the "macrophage" immune cell can go rogue, causing havoc in the brain. "Macrophage" means "big eaters" in Greek and is a fitting name for the cell because - when behaving - it digests cellular debris and foreign substances.

The Klondike region of Canada is famous for its gold, but now other remarkable ancient treasures have been unearthed from the melting permafrost. Two mummified ice age mammals – a wolf pup and a caribou calf – were discovered by gold miners in the area in 2016 and unveiled on Thursday at a ceremony in Dawson in Yukon territory.

Scientists are hoping archaeology, carbon dating, and tree rings together can help solve the mystery.

An unusual visitor has been hanging out in the St. Lawrence River for the past three years: A narwhal, more than 1,000 kilometres south of its usual range. But the lone narwhal is not alone — it appears he has been adopted by a band of belugas. The narwhal — thought to be a juvenile male because of its half-metre-long tusk — was filmed in July playing among a pod of young belugas, thought to be mostly or all males.

If you ship whiskey on a river, does it taste better? We wanted to know, so we ran an experiment.

Videos abound on the internet of people using customized hats and other tools to hand-feed the tiny fliers. Here’s what you need to know if you’d like to try it.

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, produces massive amounts of energy. Scientists here on Earth seek to replicate this process, which merges light elements in the form of hot, charged plasma composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, to create a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity in what may be called a “star in a jar.”

NASA’s TESS spacecraft — that stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, in case you had somehow forgotten — is an incredibly powerful tool for spotting distant worlds. It was launched back in April, but it took some time to get the satellite up to speed and begin working on actual science objectives. Now, in a demonstration of its power, NASA is showing off the first science image the satellite has captured, and boy is it a beauty. The image is absolutely packed with stars, taking a half hour to soak in the light and produce the collection of pictures you see below.

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell will donate the money to help students underrepresented in physics

Phosphorus, which is vital to life but somewhat rare, condensed inside asteroids in the outer Solar System before moving back towards the sun, where some of it ended up on Earth, according to new research.

Scientists have discovered a new way of treating skin wounds in mice by tricking the cells in the wound into becoming healing surface skin cells. The findings raise the prospect of being able to develop simple, non-surgical treatments for human wounds in the future. Large skin wounds and ulcers are painful and occasionally life-threatening. When the surface of the skin is ruptured, epithelial cells, which make up the outer layer of the skin, migrate towards the wound in an effort to seal up the injury.

In the 1800s, there were so many bighorn sheep in Wyoming that when one trapper passed through Jackson Hole, he described “over a thousand sheep in the cliffs above our campsite.” No such sights exist today. The bighorns slowly fell to hunters’ rifles, and to diseases spread from domestic sheep. Most herds were wiped out, and by 1900, a species that once numbered in the millions stood instead in the low thousands.

Gene-sequence data is changing the way that botanists think about their classification schemes. A recent name-change for a common houseplant resulted from the discovery that it belonged in an overlooked genus.

The weird hexagon swirling around Saturn's north pole is much taller than scientists had thought, a new study suggests. Researchers have generally regarded the 20,000-mile-wide (32,000 kilometers) hexagon — a jet stream composed of air moving at about 200 mph (320 km/h) — as a lower-atmosphere phenomenon, restricted to the clouds of Saturn's troposphere.