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749 articles · page 5 of 16 · The Science front page
Britain's cocaine market is worth an estimated £9.8bn a year, with consumption rising 26% since 2021 despite flat survey data, according to a new analysis that also reveals record death rates driven by an ageing cohort of users.
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Royal Darwin Hospital has apologised to about a dozen pregnant patients whose confidential medical information was posted to Instagram by a doctor attached to the hospital's obstetrics and gynaecology unit, describing the incident as a serious breach of trust.
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Eastern Australia is being battered by what the Bureau of Meteorology has described as an 'unusually large' multi-state system of severe thunderstorms, bringing the threat of damaging winds, hail, flash flooding and power outages across a vast area from southern Queensland to Victoria. Bureau meteorologist David Crock said the line of storms extended from the Snowy Mountains to the Queensland border, with the potential for further dangerous weather on Monday.
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The 2026 Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix at Phillip Island, the final MotoGP to be held at the circuit before the event relocates to Adelaide in 2027, was abruptly cancelled on Sunday afternoon when persistent rain reduced visibility, grounding the medical helicopter and making conditions unsafe for racing. Organisers delayed the start multiple times before announcing the cancellation at 3.35pm. Riders then completed a lap behind the safety car and stopped on the main straight to greet fans, bringing an anticlimactic end to the 'Final Roar'.
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A measles outbreak that began in late April in rural Pennsylvania has ballooned to more than 1,300 cases, making it the state's largest spread of the disease in over three decades. At least six people have died, including two infants, and about one in five cases have resulted in hospitalisation. The outbreak has largely affected Amish communities, where low vaccination rates and scepticism of modern medicine have created a public health challenge now entangled in a political confrontation between state and federal officials.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have identified a distinct subtype of prostate cell that accumulates in the gland's transition zone, offering a new hypothesis for why benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) develops with age. The findings, published in The Journal of Pathology, point to WIF1+ basal cells as a potential trigger for the condition that affects millions of men over 50.
Margaret Owen, 93, lay on the floor of her home in Abercynon, Rhondda Cynon Taf, for 10 and a half hours with fractures to her femur and shoulder before an ambulance arrived, her son Graham Anthony has said. She fell on 4 October and activated her lifeline alarm at 06:15, but an ambulance did not take her to hospital until 17:00, after a St John Ambulance worker attended at 15:30 at the request of the Welsh Ambulance Service.
Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have found that the longfin inshore squid employs RNA editing on an unprecedented scale, theoretically producing a staggeringly vast array of protein variants. The study, published in the journal Cell, details how these cephalopods modify their genetic instructions without altering their DNA, offering new insights into their alien-like biology.
Archaeologists working at the ruins of Juukan Gorge in Western Australia's Pilbara region have recovered 50,000 artefacts, with some dating back 50,000 years, in what lead researcher Michael Slack has described as one of the most important sites in Australian archaeology. The excavation, commissioned by the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people (PKKP), is the first full scientific dig at the rock shelter since Rio Tinto's authorised mining blast destroyed it in 2020.
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Victoria's emergency departments are facing an unprecedented surge in acutely ill and elderly patients, leaving staff struggling to cope and patients waiting hours for care. Ahead of the state election, the government will announce a $1.5 billion plan to expand emergency departments and hire more staff, but doctors and paramedics warn the crisis runs deeper.
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The UK government has announced new proposals to crack down on 'cowboy clinics' by restricting high-risk cosmetic procedures to qualified healthcare professionals, banning them for under-18s and introducing unlimited fines for rule-breakers. The move follows the death of Alice Webb after a liquid Brazilian butt lift and safety alerts over 'vampire facials'.
Full results from a late-stage trial presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress show that adding Amgen's immunotherapy Imdelltra to AstraZeneca's Imfinzi reduced the risk of death by 58% in patients with extensive-stage small cell lung cancer. Patients on the combination lived a median 21.1 months, versus 12.7 months with Imfinzi alone.
An international team led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) has uncovered a surprisingly complex network of magnetic structures hidden above regions of the Sun that appear relatively calm. Using the Sunrise-III solar observatory, which floated about 35 kilometres above Earth in the stratosphere during a balloon mission in 2024, scientists detected delicate, thread-like magnetic features woven through the solar atmosphere, apparently shaped by twisting motions on the Sun’s surface.
Samples collected from asteroid Bennu by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission have revealed surprising new details about the formation of the Solar System, challenging assumptions about the asteroid's origin and suggesting Jupiter played a key role in mixing materials from the inner and outer Solar System nearly 4.5 billion years ago.
A global phase 3 trial led by Australian researchers has found that adding the drug darolutamide to standard testosterone suppression and radiation therapy reduces the risk of prostate cancer relapsing and spreading by 58 per cent in very high-risk men, prompting calls to change the standard of care for these patients.
· 4 sourcesResearchers at the University of Vermont have discovered a consistent preference for safety over danger in human language, a finding that overturns a widely accepted model of word meaning that has stood for more than seven decades. The study, published in Science Advances, introduces a mathematical approach called ousiometrics and shows that the traditional valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) framework, developed by psychologist Charles Osgood in the 1950s, may miss a deeper structure rooted in survival priorities.
Researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore have developed a solar-powered device that generates hydrogen from seawater while simultaneously degrading hydrazine, a highly toxic industrial wastewater pollutant. The proof-of-concept artificial leaf, described in Nature Communications, combines a miniature solar cell, an electrolyzer, and a wastewater treatment system into one unit, producing hydrogen at a rate of 466 μmol per square centimeter per hour and reducing hydrazine concentrations from 0.5 M to 0.5 parts per billion, well below US EPA limits.
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have identified a single protein, MTCH2, that acts as a switch determining whether human cells burn fat or store it. Disabling this protein, nicknamed 'Mitch', increased fat consumption and blocked the formation of new fat cells in laboratory experiments, offering a potential new approach to obesity treatment that targets metabolism rather than appetite.
A family of retroviruses that infected the ancestors of chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas millions of years ago but spared humans may have helped drive the divergence of human and chimpanzee brain development, according to a study published in Science Advances.
A mysterious cloud that appears each Martian spring and summer, stretching over 1,000 miles before vanishing, may be caused by a physical process never before directly observed in any planet’s atmosphere, according to a new study.
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A personalised mRNA vaccine for melanoma showed a 42% reduction in death or recurrence in a major trial, while Kenya reported a second Ebola death and several drug developments emerged, including a new psoriasis pill approved in the UK.
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The last surviving fragment of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the Barnes Ice Cap in the Canadian Arctic, holds direct physical evidence that the next ice age was naturally beginning about 2,000 years ago, until human-caused climate warming halted the process around 1960, according to a new study in the journal Science.
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A wind gust of 84mph (135km/h) was recorded in Capel Curig, Conwy county, on Saturday as Storm Boelo brought widespread disruption to Wales, leaving hundreds of homes without power on Sunday morning. Four flood warnings remain in place along the River Ely in south Wales, and a yellow wind warning covers parts of north Wales until 21:00 GMT Sunday. Ferry services between Holyhead and Dublin as well as Pembroke and Rosslare have been cancelled or delayed, while rail lines are blocked by flooding and fallen trees.
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The World Health Organization has announced the start of the first clinical trial of an Ebola vaccine in the outbreak under way in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with participants receiving the Ervebo shot in Bunia, the epicentre of the epidemic in the northeastern Ituri province.
Kenya has announced its second Ebola death, a 65-year-old woman who was a close relative of the country's first victim, as the virus outbreak spreads from the Democratic Republic of the Congo into multiple African nations. The Kenyan Ministry of Health said on Friday that there is currently no evidence of community transmission.
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The makers of Blue Planet III are deliberately including cloudier, less polished footage to reassure viewers that the animals and scenes are authentic and not generated by artificial intelligence.
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A marsquake recorded by NASA's InSight lander in August 2021 was caused by rocks slipping along fault lines deep beneath Valles Marineris, according to a new study. The finding indicates that the solar system's largest canyon remains tectonically active, despite Mars having no tectonic plates.
NASA has laid out the full operating plan for Artemis III, its 2027 mission to rehearse future Moon landing operations in low Earth orbit, naming the four astronauts who will fly it. NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas will join European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano on the planned 14-day mission aboard Orion, testing commercial landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX before crews begin landing near the Moon's South Pole in 2028.
· 2 sourcesResearchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have created an ultra-thin, flexible electronic mesh that integrates with living human heart cells and converts their mechanical contractions into electricity, achieving more than ten times the energy density of conventional energy-harvesting approaches. The device, described in a study published in Science Advances, offers a potential way to power medical implants and wearables without bulky batteries.
NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has concluded its science mission, the space agency announced, ending more than two decades of observations that transformed the study of gamma-ray bursts and other cosmic explosions. The spacecraft, now orbiting less than 275 kilometres above Earth, can no longer keep its telescopes steady, and is expected to re-enter the atmosphere in the coming weeks.
NASA announced Friday it remains on track to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028, laying out detailed plans for a competitive face-off between SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander in Earth orbit next year. Administrator Jared Isaacman confirmed the agency will launch Artemis III in summer 2027 as a docking exercise with both landers, confined to Earth orbit, before selecting one company for the first crewed Moon landing since Apollo.
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The US Space Force is under pressure to identify and build a new heavy-lift launch site by 2030, adding a third launch base to relieve strain on the decades-old facilities in Florida and California, but no location has been chosen and land acquisition remains unresolved, officials said.
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Two LaserSETI detectors installed at Saudi Arabia's AlUla Manara observatory have begun scanning the sky for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, marking the first Asian site in a growing global network designed to spot brief laser pulses from distant civilizations.
The chair of the board overseeing the National Institutes of Health's Clinical Center has publicly rebuked Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., warning that his anti-vaccine activities could damage the reputation of the research hospital often called the 'house of hope' for patients with rare conditions.
A new study shows that crows can process visual information at twice the speed of mammals, despite lacking the neocortex that primates rely on for decision-making. The findings challenge assumptions about the neural basis of rapid visual judgment.
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A new study from CSIRO and the University of Melbourne has found that the reliability of long-range El Niño forecasts depends heavily on the ocean's starting state. By analysing over 7,500 historical forecasts, researchers discovered that predictions initiated during La Niña conditions consistently perform well even a year ahead, while those begun from neutral conditions are far less reliable. The finding could improve early warning systems for the destructive weather phenomenon, which the UN calls a 'wrecking ball' of extreme heat, drought and flooding.
Finland has granted an operating licence for Onkalo, the world's first permanent underground repository for spent nuclear fuel, marking a historic step in nuclear waste management. The licence was issued by the government to waste management company Posiva, which said the facility still requires final commissioning tests and inspection approval from Finland's Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) before final disposal begins.
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Health officials are investigating whether Nigeria's first Ebola patient in more than a decade crossed paths with Kenya's first Ebola patient at Uganda's Entebbe International Airport on the same day, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. The agency stressed that the airport encounter is only one possible scenario and that no link has been established.
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SpaceX chief Elon Musk has pushed back against a NASA safety panel's suggestion that around 22 launches might be required to support a Starship landing on the Moon, calling the figure "way too high" and putting the actual number at 6 to 8. The disagreement, aired on X, comes as the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel also warned about future access to low Earth orbit if SpaceX phases out its Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft.
For the first time, researchers have imaged the precise molecular structure that malaria parasites use to invade human red blood cells. A team led by Chi-Min Ho at Columbia University captured the moving junction, a ring-shaped portal that opens and closes in less than a minute, in atomic detail using cryo-electron microscopy. The findings, published in a new study, explain how the parasite remodels the host cell's membrane to slip through without a trace, potentially informing the next generation of malaria drugs.
Researchers who developed a synthetic peptide to block Alzheimer's-related protein clumps have discovered that the same molecule is already present in human blood, with levels roughly halved in people diagnosed with the disease. The finding, published in PNAS Nexus, suggests HAEE could serve both as a biomarker for early detection and as a basis for therapy.
Researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a computational framework that models the complete optical cycle of spin defects in crystals such as diamond and silicon carbide, including internal conversion, the energy-loss pathway that has long resisted accurate simulation. The work, published in Physical Review Letters, could improve the design of materials for quantum sensors and computers.
Scientists have found evidence that fresh magma is slowly accumulating beneath Japan's Kikai caldera, a supervolcano that produced the largest known eruption of the past 11,700 years, giving researchers a rare look at how giant volcanic systems rebuild their underground magma supplies.
People with Parkinson's disease who stay physically active may experience slower declines in memory, thinking, and movement, according to a study published in the journal Neurology. The research suggests that exercise could offer dual benefits for those living with the condition, though the authors caution that the findings show an association, not direct causation.
Scientists at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine have discovered that microscopic titanium particles released from corroding dental implants hijack the immune system, explaining why antibiotic-resistant infections known as peri-implantitis affect up to one in five implant recipients. The findings, published in PNAS Nexus, identify a calcium channel in immune cells as a potential drug target for a condition that costs healthcare systems more than $1 billion annually.
Dutch startup Elysian Aircraft has completed the first test flights of a scaled demonstrator for its E9X, a battery-powered aircraft designed to carry 90 passengers up to 1,000 kilometres. The company aims to bring the aircraft into commercial service by 2034, claiming the design could eliminate emissions from half the world's flights. The push for electric aviation is being supported by parallel ventures in pilot training and charging infrastructure in the Netherlands and beyond.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that deep-sea ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico have not recovered from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Fish numbers are down 63.5 percent, crustaceans by 62 percent and cephalopods by nearly 60 percent, with the researchers identifying the spill and the use of chemical dispersants as the most likely cause of the sustained decline.
Switzerland’s glaciers lost more than 5% of their total ice volume in 2026, contributing to a cumulative decline of nearly 20% over just five years, according to the annual report from the Swiss Academy of Sciences. The findings, published October 23 by ETH Zurich, show that extreme summer heat and an unusually snowless winter pushed several major glaciers to their worst melting on record and caused smaller glaciers to disappear completely.