A traditional yogurt-making practice from south-eastern Europe uses live ants as a starter, with the insects providing the bacteria and acid needed to initiate fermentation

Puppies that are raised in someone's home seem to benefit from that extra human interaction, by asking for help at a younger age than those brought up in kennels

A fossil of a tadpole from Argentina is 161 million years old - and isn't that different from some modern species

Asian elephants at Berlin Zoo show impressive skill when using a hose as a tool, and even appear to sabotage each other by stopping the flow of water

Never underestimate what a single gopher can achieve in a day: one of the burrowing mammals helped boost soil fungi in an area blanketed by ash from the explosive eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington state

Could potassium fortification be the answer we're looking for when it comes to battling our unhealthy addiction to salt?

Strange solids called temporal metamaterials finally make it possible to investigate the controversial idea of quantum friction – and push special relativity to its limits

The same genetic tools being used to resurrect the woolly mammoth and dodo could help many other vulnerable species that have yet to die out

Climate change means extreme heat will become the norm for millions across the world. We joined an experiment in the Saudi Arabian desert designed to find out what that means for our brains and bodies

See the circle of galaxy clusters and voids that surround us in this map of the nearby cosmos, extending 200 million light years in each direction

We may never know what lies beyond the boundaries of the observable universe, but the fabric of the cosmos can tell us whether the universe is infinite or not

Remote sensing, including lidar, reveals that the Amazon was once home to millions of people. The emerging picture of how they lived challenges ideas of human cultural evolution

To even out the intermittent power supply from wind and solar, we need to build vast energy storage facilities. It turns out the best solution might be cheap, simple ideas like heating bricks and lifting weights

Better fitness in children is linked to better cognition and health in later life, but the majority in the US and UK don't get nearly enough. Here's what parents can do

When we take a break from exercise, it can feel like we quickly go back to square one. But this isn't the case, and there are various ways to minimise the decline

If the idea of exercise is more attractive than the reality, you aren't alone. But there are ways to train your motivation and develop better habits

When it comes to exercise, more isn't necessarily better – and we're now discovering the ideal dose for better health

The slow-running movement, in which people meet for unhurried jogs, is booming – but don't be fooled into thinking that if there's no pain, there's no gain

There are secrets aplenty in a pot of honey – from information about bees' "micro-bee-ota" to DNA from the environment – that can help us fight food fraud and even monitor shifts in climate

New blood tests can reveal whether your immune system is fighting fit by looking at the balance of different immune cells, but there may be a simpler way of gauging your immune health

For decades, the oceans have absorbed much of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gases. The latest observations suggest they are reaching their limits, so how worried should we be?

Surrounding ourselves with greenery can do wonders for our physical and mental wellbeing. Kathy Willis reveals just what kinds of plants are best for our brains and bodies, and why

Promising new vaccines are designed to be given to patients at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. If they perform well in clinical trials, they have the potential to one day rid society of dementia

Advances in generative AI mean fake images, videos, audio and bots are now everywhere. But studies have revealed the best ways to tell if something is real

They fight invaders, clear debris and tend neural connections, but sometimes microglia go rogue. Preventing this malfunction may offer new treatments for brain conditions including Alzheimer's

Clouds can trap heat or reflect it away from Earth, making their impact on global warming extraordinarily hard to predict. Now, new ways of studying them are lifting the fog

Forget atomic clocks. Nuclear clocks, which only drop a second every 300 billion years, can test whether nature's fundamental constants are constant after all

From migrating sauropods and semi-aquatic predators to doting parents, palaeontologists are finally uncovering the mysteries of the lifestyles of dinosaurs

Astronomer Jo Dunkley is planning to use the Simons Observatory to snare evidence for inflation, the theory that the universe expanded at incredible speed after its birth

Confidence in politics is falling around the world. Can scientific insights help us create a fairer, smarter foundation for government?

Neuroscientists have been surprised to discover that the human brain is teeming with microbes, and we are beginning to suspect they could play a role in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's

Discoveries from the genomes of the last Neanderthals are rewriting the story of how our own species came to replace them

Could the universe's missing matter be hiding in a "dark" extra dimension? We now have simple ways to test this outlandish idea - and the existence of extra dimensions more generally

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

The discovery that a small blue blob of neurons, the locus coeruleus, controls your mode of thinking suggests ways to increase learning, creativity, focus and alertness

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

The systems we use to produce food have many problems, from horrifying waste to their dependence on fossil fuels. Vaclav Smil explains how to fix them

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

From seed oils to olive oil, we now have an overwhelming choice of what to cook with. Here’s how they all stack up, according to the scientific evidence

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

The controversies surrounding football’s video assistant referee (VAR) system highlight our troubled relationship with uncertainty – and point to potential solutions

A super-stretchy hydrogel can stretch to 15 times its original length and return to its initial shape, and could be used to make soft inflatable robots

A new equation shows a surprisingly simple relationship between pressure and the temperature needed to melt any solid substance into a liquid

Claudia de Rham thinks that gravitons, hypothetical particles thought to carry gravity, have mass. If she’s right, we can expect to see “rainbows” in ripples in space-time

The physicist Peter Higgs quietly revolutionised quantum field theory, then lived long enough to see the discovery of the Higgs boson he theorised. Despite receiving a Nobel prize, he remained in some ways as elusive as the particle that shares his name

A contentious meeting of physicists highlighted concerns, failures and possible fixes for a crisis in condensed matter physics

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

Experiments show that effect doesn’t always follow cause in the weird world of subatomic particles, offering fresh clues about the quantum origins of space-time