Despite their failure to attract a single Republican co-sponsor, Democrats in Congress have long insisted that a bill to strengthen scientific integrity across U.S. government agencies takes a bipartisan stance and is not a veiled attack on the Trump administration’s attitude toward science. That claim of bipartisanship took a big step forward today as the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives tweaked the bill to satisfy key Republicans on the panel.

Many people have DNA inside them that they inherited from extinct hominins like the Neanderthals – and now we know that in some cases it isn’t just tiny snippets but long stretches. Over the past decade, genetic analysis of human DNA has revealed that ancient humans must have interbred many times with other hominins such as Neanderthals. The result is that DNA from these extinct groups can be found in many human populations today.

The drive to make more milk has had an unsavory side effect: Cows have become more genetically similar and less fertile. Scientists are trying to recover valuable genetic variation that was lost.

MIT researchers developed a way to recover lost data in images, and it could convert 2D medical scans like X-rays into 3D ones like CT scans in the future.

An international team of scientists, led by the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), have found a new compound of plutonium with an unexpected, pentavalent oxidation state. This new phase of plutonium is solid and stable, and may be a transient phase in radioactive waste repositories. The results are published this week in Angewandte Chemie as a Very Important Paper (VIP).

Scientists are perplexed by the slime mould, which has no brain, mouth, stomach or eyes, yet is capable of learning, digesting food, has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself within two minutes if cut in half.

There are advantages to being smart. People who do well on standardized tests of intelligence—IQ tests—tend to be more successful in the classroom and the workplace. Although the reasons are not fully understood, they also tend to live longer, healthier lives, and are less likely to experience negative life events such as bankruptcy.

A study that raised questions over the future health of the world’s first gene-edited babies has been retracted because of key errors that undermined its conclusion.

Scientists are perplexed by the slime mould, which has no brain, mouth, stomach or eyes, yet is capable of learning, digesting food, has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself within two minutes if cut in half.

Nasa found evidence of alien life in the 1970s, according to a former senior scientist – and ignored it. The Viking landers were sent to the Martian surface more than 40 years ago, with the aim of exploring the planet. They included an experiment known as Labeled Release, or LR, which was intended to look for signs of life on the planet.

Prolonged exposure to blue light, such as that which emanates from your phone, computer and household fixtures, could be affecting your longevity, even if it’s not shining in your eyes. New research at Oregon State University suggests that the blue wavelengths produced by light-emitting diodes damage cells in the brain as well as retinas.

Another example of how, biologically, islands are deeply weird.

One company wants to help farmers adapt to a world of rapidly declining bee populations.

For the first time, artificial mouse embryos have started growing into early fetuses, but we are still a long way off making babies without sperm or eggs

For the first time ever, scientists have found corals that were thought to have been killed by heat stress have recovered, a glimmer of hope for the world's climate change-threatened reefs.

Start thinking about numbers and they can become large very quickly. The diameter of the universe is about 8.8×1023 km and the largest number with a name—googolplex, 1010100—outranks it enormously. Although that colossal concept was dreamt up by brilliant mathematicians, we’re still pretty limited when it comes to assessing quantities at a glance. ‘Humans have a threshold limit for instantly processing one to four elements accurately,’ says Adrian Dyer from RMIT University, Australia; and it seems that we are not alone.

A new review of research on the Zika virus since 2016 finds there is still much scientists don't understand about the pandemic — including when another may strike.

In the battle against antibiotic resistance, many scientists have been trying to deploy naturally occurring viruses called bacteriophages that can infect and kill bacteria. Bacteriophages kill bacteria through different mechanisms than antibiotics, and they can target specific strains, making them an appealing option for potentially overcoming multidrug resistance. However, quickly finding and optimizing well-defined bacteriophages to use against a bacterial target is challenging.

Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a capsule strong enough to survive stomach acid.

Scientists at the Biodiversity Unit of the University of Turku have studied the diversity of tropical parasitoid wasps for years.