Understanding the “effort paradox” can help you reshape your relationship to exertion so that you commit to those hard but truly meaningful activities

Cases of prostate cancer are surging alarmingly around the world. Thankfully, we are developing more accurate tests that can catch the condition early

As more of us take up vaping and concerns rise about the long-term effects, we now have enough data to get a grip on the health impact – and how it compares to smoking

New research into the moments between wakefulness and sleep could bring hope for insomniacs and even make us more creative problem-solvers

An outlandish experiment searching for a brain network that tunes up and down the feeling of immersion is hoping to unlock the therapeutic effects of psychedelics

Diets that claim to control excess oestrogen or stress hormones are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. They could be good for us, just not for the reasons claimed

Our ancestors probably used a wide range of plant-based tools that have since been lost to history. Now we're finally getting a glimpse of this Botanic Age

From nuclear strikes to giant spikes, discover the systems in place to prevent a collision and test your decision-making to see if you could avoid a catastrophic impact

Extreme weather and a growing population is driving a food security crisis. What can we do to break the vicious cycle of carbon emissions, climate change and soaring food costs – or is it already too late?

Cosmological puzzles are tempting astronomers to rethink our simple picture of the universe – and ask whether dark matter is even stranger than we thought

Concern over the risks of enabling nuclear weapons development is usually focused on nuclear fission reactors, but the potential harm from more advanced fusion reactors has been underappreciated

A practical superconductor would transform the efficiency of electronics. After decades of hunting, several key breakthroughs are inching us very close to this coveted prize

The Linac Coherent Light Source in California fired an X-ray pulse that lasted only a few hundred billionths of a billionth of a second but carried nearly a terawatt of power

Subatomic particles can appear to instantly influence one another, no matter how far apart they are. These days, that isn't a source of mystery – it's a fact of the universe and a resource for new technologies

When I heard Stephen Hawking extol the mysteries of black holes, I knew theoretical physics was what I wanted to do. There is still so much to learn about these strange regions, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

A technique to charge a battery inside a quantum computer relies on sorting qubits in an imitation of Maxwell’s demon, a 19th-century thought experiment once thought to break the laws of physics

Whether space and time are part of the universe or they emerge from quantum entanglement is one of the biggest questions in physics. And we are getting close to the truth

One hundred years ago, we discovered there were other galaxies beyond our own. Now, we might be on the verge of another discovery: that there are other universes

The gamma ray burst known as GRB221009A is the biggest explosion astronomers have ever glimpsed and we might finally know what caused the blast

An experiment to test distant particles’ ability to correlate their behaviour is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that classical ideas about reality are incorrect

To determine an object’s quantum properties, you may only need to measure how it exchanges heat with its environment, without touching the object itself

A single ytterbium atom, cooled down to extreme temperatures and manipulated with laser beams, could reveal how gravity affects quantum objects

With its particles in two places at once, quantum theory strains our common sense notions of how the universe should work. But one group of physicists says we can get reality back if we just redefine its foundations

Experiments in a state-of-the-art wave tank suggest we have underestimated the potential size and power of rogue waves and the risk they pose to offshore infrastructure

A recent atomic physics workshop was outside my dark matter comfort zone, but learning about science beyond my usual boundaries was invigorating, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Simple words like "force" and "particle" can mislead us as to what reality is actually like. Physicist Matt Strassler unpacks how to see things more clearly

If gravity is a truly quantum entity, something as simple as measuring the strength of an object’s gravitational field should change its quantum state

Inside a hunk of a material called a semimetal, scientists have uncovered signatures of bizarre particles that sometimes move like they have no mass, but at other times move just like a very massive particle

Shapes created by vortices in water often fall apart, but an odd quantum fluid made from ultracold atoms could support vortex knots that never lose their knottiness

Changes in the distribution of groundwater around the planet between 1993 and 2010 were enough to make Earth's poles drift by 80 centimetres

Earth appears to have less mass beneath a certain part of the Indian Ocean compared with the rest of the planet. Plumes of magma at the location could explain why

Chris Packham's new BBC series, Earth, looks at significant moments in Earth's history, including anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss, "It's not a sixth mass extinction event that we're precipitating," he says, "it's a mass extermination event"

Earth’s iron-rich inner core may owe some of its surprising softness to the motion of atoms, suggest experiments with iron at high temperature and pressure coupled to AI simulations

Once seen as miraculous, these days ice is no longer extraordinary. But in a winter season when Antarctic sea ice hit a historic low, it is clear we should cherish it more, says Max Leonard

Scientific bodies are due to make an official decision in the coming year about whether to declare a new geochronological unit precipitated by the impact of humans on Earth

An ocean research vessel has just discovered four underwater mountains, the tallest almost 3 kilometres high, that might be hotspots of deep-sea life

Humans are drastically changing the planet and the Anthropocene is a useful tool to help us deal with that – so let's stop quibbling over definitions

Climate change is making extreme cold upwellings more common in certain regions of the world, and these events can be catastrophic for animals such as bull sharks

Long feted by fossil hunters and geologists, if UNESCO recognises the extraordinary rock formation at Madygen in Kyrgyzstan, it will soon be a player on the world stage

El Niño and La Niña cycles driven by ocean temperatures in the Pacific can influence weather in the North Atlantic 12 months later – a finding that could improve long-range forecasts

Endurance sank beneath the ice during Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Antarctic expedition. More than a hundred years later, researchers document their own saga of how they found the vessel

Diets that claim to control excess oestrogen or stress hormones are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. They could be good for us, just not for the reasons claimed

Thanks to artificial intelligence, understanding animals may be closer than we think. But we may not like what they are going to tell us, says RSPCA chief executive Chris Sherwood

Endurance sank beneath the ice during Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Antarctic expedition. More than a hundred years later, researchers document their own saga of how they found the vessel

Inside a hunk of a material called a semimetal, scientists have uncovered signatures of bizarre particles that sometimes move like they have no mass, but at other times move just like a very massive particle

Fibres in wet wipes and clothes often make their way into soil - and natural versions could be more damaging than synthetic ones

The earliest evidence of livestock with modified horns has been discovered in ancient Egypt – sheep skulls with horns that point in unnatural directions suggest humans forced them to grow that way

Shapes created by vortices in water often fall apart, but an odd quantum fluid made from ultracold atoms could support vortex knots that never lose their knottiness

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. In our latest glimpse into the near future, Rowan Hooper tells how seaweed was a game changer when it came to getting carbon out of the atmosphere in the 2030s

In More and More and More, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argues that tackling climate change means rethinking our history of energy consumption – and exposing the green transition as a fiction