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

The lifestyle choices you make in middle age play a particularly important role in how your brain ages

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

More and more parents are choosing to only have one child. Here’s what the evidence says about how growing up without siblings affects their personality traits and well-being

From artificial retinas to ageing mice, here are five of the most promising results from research performed on the ISS – and what they might mean for humans on Earth and in space

Artificial intelligence has more in common with ants than humans, says Neil Lawrence. Only by taking a more nuanced view of intelligence can we see how machines will truly transform society

Male pattern baldness could soon be a thing of the past, with new hair loss treatments beginning to show tantalising results

We're finally pinning down the mechanisms that drive obsessive-compulsive disorder, revealing a complex combination of imbalanced brain networks, the immune system and even gut microbes

How did the supermassive black holes we’re now seeing in the early universe get so big so fast? Astrophysicist Sophie Koudmani is using sophisticated galaxy simulations to figure it out

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

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

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

Most ingredients touted as the key to better health fail to live up to the hype but fibre bucks this trend, with benefits for the whole body, not just the gut

Our metabolism's response to food is highly idiosyncratic and there are hints that tailoring our diet to these personal differences can deliver health benefits

You might have heard about plans to establish a self‑sustaining city on Mars. Here’s what life would really be like on the Red Planet

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

Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist Peter Higgs has died aged 94. He proposed the particle that gives other particles mass – now named the Higgs boson and discovered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012

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

We can’t stir ordinary solids, but one research team now claims to have stirred an extraordinary quantum “supersolid”, generating tiny vortices

Two important barriers to a stable, powerful fusion reaction have been leapt by an experiment in a small tokamak reactor, but we don’t yet know if the technique will work in larger devices

The Large Hadron Collider is testing entanglement in a whole new energy range, probing the meaning of quantum theory – and the possibility that an even stranger reality lies beneath

Ultra-fast pulses of laser light can be shaped into vortices similar to smoke rings – when chained together, they can carry enough information to transmit a simple image

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

A solar energy absorber that uses quartz to trap heat reached 1050°C in tests and could offer a way to decarbonise the production of steel and cement

Time loops have long been the stuff of science fiction. Now, using the rules of quantum mechanics, we have a way to effectively transport a particle back in time – here’s how

Physicists have coaxed a cloud of atoms into having a temperature beyond absolute zero and placed them in a geometric structure that could produce an unknown form of matter

It should be possible to combine several quantum states, each with almost no energy, to create a single quantum state containing unexpectedly energy-rich regions

ITER, a €20 billion nuclear fusion reactor under construction in France, will now not switch on until 2035 - a delay of 10 years. With smaller commercial fusion efforts on the rise, is it worth continuing with this gargantuan project?

An experiment with a robot and gelatine determined that 65-micrometre-thick paper is the most prone to slicing our skin – but it can also make for a handy recyclable knife

Photographer Enrico Sacchetti captures the power and potential of ITER, an international nuclear fusion experiment currently under construction in southern France

An ordinary-looking valley has a secret – each of its neighbours is 20 years removed in time. Scott Alexander Howard's debut is heartfelt and deeply enjoyable, says Emily H. Wilson

Entangled particles of light can transmit holographic images that can be selectively erased, allowing for secure communications that can also be deleted

In 2022, physicists were excited by hints that something was wrong with our understanding of the universe - but new results have put that in doubt

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

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

The symbols and mathematical operations used in the laws of physics follow a pattern that could reveal something fundamental about the universe

Marie Curie redefined the role of women in science by training a generation of “lab daughters” to have stellar careers, shows Dava Sobel's detailed and intimate new biography, The Elements of Marie Curie

Alan Turing's theories about computation seem to have a startling consequence, placing hard limits on how fast or slow any physical process in the universe can grow

The Impossible Man by Patchen Barss salutes Roger Penrose's groundbreaking work in physics and mathematics while challenging the idea that a genius should be exempt from ordinary obligations

From a photograph of algae choking an Indian river to a shocking depiction of the wearing away of the UK coast, these are some of the pictures in the running for the contest

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

The destruction of telecommunications cables during the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano in 2022 shows that underwater debris currents can travel at 122 kilometres per hour

Understanding how the world’s largest-known collection of pink diamonds came to the surface in Australia around 1.3 billion years ago could help us find hidden deposits elsewhere in the world

Analysis of tree rings shows that two faults near Seattle, Washington ruptured at the same time or soon after each other more than 1000 years ago – a repeat today would cause a major disaster in the region

Few volcanos come with more risk than Mexico's Popocatépetl, situated near Mexico City.  To mitigate danger, volcanologist Chiara Maria Petrone is trying to predict its next eruption

The stratosphere seems to be full of aluminium particles and other metals that come from spacecraft burning up in the atmosphere, and those particles could mess up polar clouds

An area of the seabed north of Australia has been mapped in detail for the first time, revealing that large numbers of people could have lived there until it was inundated by rising seas

Photographer Matjaz Krivic has been charting the effects of lithium mining on locals in the world's largest salt flat in Bolivia since 2016

The Kikai-Akahoya eruption of an underwater volcano off the coast of Japan ejected enough material to fill Lake Tahoe twice, three times as much as the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815