Campaigners are calling for stricter controls on rodenticides after finding that birds of prey in England are increasingly being exposed to high doses of rat poison

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

Are points of infinite curvature, where general relativity breaks down, always hidden inside black holes? An audacious attempt to find out is shedding light on the mystery of quantum gravity

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

Our arm of the Milky Way is filled with older, metal-rich stars. New research suggests these might provide the best conditions for life to form on their planets

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

Research has found the universe is remarkably similar in structure to the human brain. But does this mean the cosmos has a consciousness of its own?

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

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

It may soon be possible to vaccinate ourselves against the diseases of old age, keeping our body and brain healthier for longer

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

There may be ways to work with your body’s natural daily and monthly cycles to get the maximum benefits from workouts and avoid injury

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

The International Space Station will burn up and splash down into the Pacific sometime around 2030. What could possibly go wrong? And will we ever see anything like the ISS again?

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

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

Evidence suggests that cynicism is bad for your health. Neuroscientist Jamil Zaki describes the three ways to conquer your inner cynic to boost your well-being

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?

Past observations have indicated that the icy moon of Jupiter has a vast subsurface ocean. Launching in October, NASA’s Europa Clipper will go there in search of evidence that it could support life

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

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

A new diet based on research into the body's ageing process suggests you can increase your life expectancy by up to 20 years by changing what, when and how much you eat

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

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 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

Physicists finally know whether black holes destroy the information contained in infalling matter. The problem is that the answer hasn’t lit the way to a new understanding of space-time

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

We get about a quarter of our calories from snacks and new research shows that this isn't necessarily bad for us. Done right, snacking can boost our health

The health benefits of fermented food and drink have long been touted, but firm evidence in favour of kombucha, sauerkraut and kefir is surprisingly elusive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two types of fusion reactor called tokamaks and stellarators both have drawbacks – but a new design combining parts from both could offer the best of both worlds

Are points of infinite curvature, where general relativity breaks down, always hidden inside black holes? An audacious attempt to find out is shedding light on the mystery of quantum gravity

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

Research has found the universe is remarkably similar in structure to the human brain. But does this mean the cosmos has a consciousness of its own?

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

A set of mathematical equations can help turn apparently random observations into a clock – and then measure its accuracy

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

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