Category: Science

Researchers have built a computer that fits inside a droplet of liquid. Instead of silicon chips and electrical currents, the device uses strands of DNA — the same molecule that stores genetic information in living cells — to carry out calculations. The idea behind DNA computing is deceptively simple. DNA is made of four chemical…

There is something delightfully old-fashioned about a sealed envelope. In an age of cloud backups and cryptographic timestamps, a physical packet of paper locked away for a decade feels like a relic. But the envelope at the centre of this story was never about nostalgia. It was a safeguard against the most stubborn source of…

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced this week that it is adding three new topic areas to its X-Labs initiative, a program designed to organize research talent around ambitious, long-horizon problems in science and technology. The expansion signals that NSF intends to grow X-Labs beyond its initial slate of focus areas, building out a portfolio…

The experiments that don’t work are still doing work Ask most people to picture science and they will imagine a breakthrough: a discovery announced, a prize awarded, a headline declaring that something long suspected has finally been proved. What that picture leaves out is the overwhelming majority of scientific labour — the runs that produce…

When Dolly the sheep was unveiled to the world in 1997, she became an instant global celebrity. The first mammal cloned from an adult cell, she was hailed as a scientific milestone and denounced as a step too far, depending on who was talking. But long after the ethical debates cooled, one detail about her…

An opinion essay published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Jason Arday and the Corruption of Science,” has pushed a familiar but uncomfortable question back into public view: what happens when the incentives of modern academia reward visibility more than verification? Arday, a sociologist of education whose appointment at the University of Cambridge drew…

When the brightest cosmic explosion ever recorded washed over Earth, it carried a passenger that, by the standard rules of physics, should never have completed the journey. Now researchers think they may have an explanation u2014 and it may not require rewriting Albert Einstein’s playbook after all.nn## The problem with an impossible photonnnGamma-ray bursts are…

For more than a century, physics has been split down the middle. On one side stands Albert Einstein’s general relativity, which describes gravity as the bending of space and time by mass and governs the behaviour of planets, stars and galaxies. On the other stands quantum mechanics, the theory of the very small, which describes…

It is one of the most durable stereotypes in modern culture: the wealthy behave badly. From film villains to viral clips of luxury cars cutting up cyclists, the idea that money corrodes character has an intuitive appeal. But is it true? A new video explainer from the Guardian digs into the research behind the cliché…

September has long been the month when publishers empty their best ideas onto the shelves, and 2026 is no exception. New Scientist’s round-up of the month’s most promising popular science titles is headlined by two very different but equally recognisable names: the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli and the British doctor and broadcaster Xand van…