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It can be difficult to figure out how to move a spacecraft from one orbit to another, but a trick from knot theory can help find spots where shifting orbits becomes easy

Carbon storage calculations don’t always take into account the effects of animals – when they eat, defecate and die, they help store lots of carbon

By measuring how birds’ vocal muscles move while they are asleep and using a physical model for how those muscles produce sound, researchers have pulled songs from the minds of sleeping birds

Identical twins seem to experience more similar levels of pleasure when listening to music than non-identical twins, which suggests it has a genetic element

Curved wing tips inspired by the world's heaviest flying bird could enhance the efficiency of wind turbines by of 10 per cent, according to simulations

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

Teams of staff usually return e-scooters to where they will be needed, but adapted scooters that can balance and stop themselves, and be controlled remotely, are a step towards autonomous ones that can take themselves wherever they have to go

Set in an English manor in 1890, Botany Manor is a video game that places you in the shoes of a botanist working on a herbarium of forgotten flora

Last year’s marine heatwaves saw an unprecedented decline in the growth of phytoplankton and algae, which many animals in the oceans depend on for food

Both a special diet that excludes “FODMAP” compounds and a low-carb high-fibre diet were effective

Cocaine and morphine hijacked neural responses in the brains of mice, which resulted in them consuming less food and water

The vertebrae of Vasuki indicus, a snake that lived 47 million years ago, suggest it could have been as long as 15 metres

Measurements of sulphur isotopes in Io’s atmosphere show that the moon may have been volcanically active for its entire lifetime

Cryptographers are scrambling to understand an algorithm that could undermine the mathematics behind next-generation encryption methods, which are intended to protect against quantum computers

A mathematical model of a particle that remembers its past so that it never travels the same path twice produces stunningly complex patterns

In the foundations of a Maya temple, researchers found the charred bones of royal individuals – possibly evidence of a fiery ritual to mark the end of one dynasty and the beginning of another

Cloud seeding almost certainly did not play a significant role in the flooding on the Arabian peninsula this week – but the heavy rains may have been exacerbated by climate change

The jawbone of an ichthyosaur uncovered in south-west England has been identified as a new species, and researchers estimate that the whole animal was 20 to 25 metres long

Underground tunnels created by lava flows provided humans with shelter for thousands of years beneath the hot desert landscape of Saudi Arabia

Amid a deluge of dour TV shows about the end of the world, Fallout, based on the hit video games of the same name and set in the wastelands of 2296, stands out, says Bethan Ackerley