It seems to be more energy efficient for emus to keep one foot on the ground when running at a moderate pace, and the same may have been true for dinosaurs

Captive dolphins are more likely to make an open-mouthed expression when their playmate can see them and they often reciprocate, hinting that it is a form of visual communication

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

A group of frogs from Madagascar have mating calls that sound like Star Trek sound effects – now their species names honour captains from the series

During a fight between two male mice, one will often run to a female mouse to distract their aggressor, a bait-and-switch strategy that could help abate social conflicts

Dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico have tiny bits of plastic in their breath, and this is probably a worldwide problem

The natural motors that power tail-like appendages in bacteria seem to have a single evolutionary origin, allowing parts from different species to be combined to create a tiny new engine

The oriental hornet shows no ill effects – or behavioural changes – when it spends a week drinking an 80 per cent alcohol solution

When it comes to the survival of animals living in the wild, the characteristics of the group can matter as much as the traits of the individual, according to a study in marmots

Eurasian reed warblers don’t just get a sense of direction from Earth’s magnetic field – they can also calculate their coordinates on a mental map

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

Tribalism can be toxic, yet we need more of it if we are to meet today’s global challenges, argues one anthropologist. His research reveals how to create a “teratribe”

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

People don't realise just how bad our antibiotic resistance problem is, says Jeanne Marrazzo, the top infectious disease specialist in the US

Taiwan’s first ever minister of digital affairs has transformed politics, using online platforms and AI to give power to the country’s citizens – with lessons for us all

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

Recent fossil finds suggest that big brains weren't an evolutionary asset to our ancestors but evolved by accident – and are likely to shrink again in the near future

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

Devices that let people with paralysis walk and talk are rapidly improving. Some see a future in which we alter memories and download skills – but major challenges remain

Fossils found 50 and 100 years ago seemed to pinpoint the moment humanity emerged – but defining a human has turned out to be far trickier than we thought

Conventional measures like blood pressure and body mass index only tell you so much. Testing your microbiome and metabolites, or even discovering your “immune grade”, can offer a clearer picture of your 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?

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

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

A better understanding of what happens to our bodies when we get fitter can unlock ways to speed up the journey – and it might be simpler than you think

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

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

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

Recent research shows that anti-inflammatory diets are not as faddish as they might sound, with the power to reduce the risk of heart attacks and some cancers

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

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?

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

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

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

To capture the clearest and most direct images of a “Wigner crystal”, a structure made entirely of electrons, researchers used a special kind of microscope and two pieces of graphene unusually free of imperfections

Researchers have used quantum light to create a magnetic field with a strength that is measured in imaginary numbers

In the 1920s, Erwin Schrödinger wrote an equation that predicts how particles-turned-waves should behave. Now, researchers are perfectly recreating those predictions in the lab

The very weak forces of attraction caused by the Casimir effect can now be used to manipulate microscopic gold flakes and turn them into a light-trapping tool

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

Information contained within quantum objects gets scrambled when they interact. Physicists have now derived a speed limit for this process, challenging the idea that black holes are the fastest data scramblers

The quantum principle of superposition – the idea of particles being in multiple places at once – could help make quantum batteries that charge within minutes

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

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

The true nature of time has eluded physicists for centuries, but a new theoretical model suggests it may only exist due to entanglement between quantum objects

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