One day, doctors might be able to 3D print copies of your organs in order to test a variety of drugs, thanks to a new technique that uses light and sound for rapid printing

Experts predict that the number of cancer cases around the world will skyrocket, resulting in millions more fatalities by 2050

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

Chronic pain has increased among adults in the US since 2019, which could be due to a rise in sedentary lifestyles or reduced access to healthcare amid covid-19 restrictions

Averting an asteroid strike will need many of the same skills we must hone to tackle climate change and future pandemics

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

We are living in a vaccine-hesitant moment, with conspiracy theories thriving on social media. We need to push back, says Simon Williams

Data collected by the Zhurong rover and orbiting satellites suggests the existence of an ancient shoreline in the Utopia Planitia region of Mars

Blood tests have shown that about 7 per cent of workers on dairy farms that had H5N1 outbreaks had antibodies against the disease

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

Genetic analysis of five individuals preserved as plaster casts in the ruins of Pompeii contradicts established beliefs about the people and their relationships

Four-legged robot dogs learned to perform new tricks by practising in a virtual platform that mimics real-world obstacles – a possible shortcut for training robots faster and more accurately

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

Reaching net-zero emissions is essential for halting climate change - but even after we achieve this goal, parts of the planet will continue to warm. Delaying net zero will worsen these effects

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

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?

Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, giving us our only up-close look at the planet – but unusual space weather just before the craft arrived has given us a misleading idea about the planet’s magnetic field

An AI-assisted robot can listen to spoken commands and assemble 3D objects such as chairs and tables out of reusable building blocks

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

An analysis of crystals in lava from the 2022 eruption of Mauna Loa has revealed an unknown magma reservoir within the volcano, which could extend forecasts of eruptions from minutes to months

Samantha Harvey has won the UK's top fiction prize for a novel that takes place over 24 hours on the International Space Station

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

An annual accounting of CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and land use change finds no sign emissions will peak this year

DNA from bones found in a cave in Germany has been identified as from Homo sapiens, showing that our species endured frigid conditions there as they expanded across the continent

A 2200-year-old burial ground in northern Italy includes people interred with dogs and horses, perhaps showing they had strong bonds with their animals

Fossil evidence shows that humans have been practising cannibalism for a million years. Now, archaeologists are discovering that some of the time they did it to honour their dead

New archaeological evidence shows that ancient humans ate each other surprisingly often - sometimes for compassionate reasons. The finds give us an opportunity to reassess our views on the practice

Archaeologists say a mysterious language inscribed on a 2000-year-old metal hand may be related to Basque, but linguists aren't convinced

Lake sediments reveal the ancient history of Aboriginal people’s use of fire to manage the landscape, a tradition that has benefits for biodiversity

Intact human brains 12,000 years old or more have been found in unexpected places such as shipwrecks and waterlogged graves, but it is unclear what preserved them

Feedback is intrigued by new research into how major sports tournaments "were associated with increases in the number of babies born" nine months later - but only for supporters of the winning teams

Isotopic analysis of horse teeth from a medieval burial site suggest that the animals were imported to England from Scandinavia or the Alps, perhaps for use in battle or jousting

Why childhood is so protracted has long been mysterious, now a spate of archaeological discoveries suggest an intriguing explanation

A modern butchery experiment using replicas of Stone Age tools raises new questions about how often prehistoric peoples hunted large animals such as bison or mammoths

Five years ago, a fossil found in the Philippines was determined to be from a new species of hominin called Homo luzonensis. Since then, we’ve learned a bit more about the newest member of the human family

A site in Siberia has evidence of human presence 417,000 years ago, raising the possibility that hominins could have reached North America much earlier than we thought

Around 3000 years ago, several empires and kingdoms in the Mediterranean collapsed, with a group of sea-faring warriors implicated as the culprit. But new evidence shows that many of our ideas about this turbulent time need completely rethinking

An experiment inspired by Homer’s description of combat in The Iliad tested the capabilities of the Dendra armour suit from Greece’s Bronze Age

An excavation on Timor reveals humans first settled on the island 44,000 years ago, long after the earliest occupation of Australia – suggesting migration to the latter took another route

Rock art along the Orinoco river in South America is made up of some of the largest etchings we know of and could date back 2000 years

Babies cannot tell us what they are experiencing, so it is hard to know what they are conscious of. But new research suggesting they perceive the world consciously could change how we care for them, says Claudia Passos-Ferreira

Rock art is a truly global phenomenon, with discoveries of cave paintings and etchings on every continent that ancient humans inhabited – but how many times was it invented over human history?

An urn found in a tomb in Spain contained the cremated remains of a man, a gold ring and about 5 litres of liquid, which has been identified as now-discoloured white wine

The skeletons of ancient Egyptian scribes reveal the health toll of sitting on the floor while performing administrative tasks like writing

Wooden sticks found in an Australian cave appear to match the accounts of a 19th-century anthropologist, suggesting the GurnaiKurnai people practised the same ritual at the end of the last glacial period

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

Tonje Bøe Birkeland's photographs imagine the exploits of fictional female scientists and adventurers from the past

Anthropologists have been arguing for 20 years about whether Sahelanthropus, a hominin that lived about 7 million years ago, was one of the first bipedal apes

DNA evidence from tombs in Sweden and Denmark suggests major plague outbreaks were responsible for the Neolithic decline in northern Europe

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