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Rising carbon dioxide levels are driving an increase in the ocean’s acidity – and this change is sinking deeper as emissions increase, putting even more marine organisms at risk

Near Space Labs’s autonomous balloon fleet is already taking high-resolution images of the ground, and its range will expand to the entire continental US early next year

Want to protect your young plants from the ravages of slugs and snails? A classic gardening tip is to use crushed eggshells to discourage them. Shame it doesn't work, says James Wong

The climate crisis is shriveling lush oases in the desert, threatening precious ecosystems and ways of life

Murder in space, a sexbot, a dystopian vision of the future: our science fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson picks her top five reads of 2024

John "Bud" Benson Wilbur isn't often remembered today, but his ideas about what the distant-future world of 1977 would look like are inspirational, says Annalee Newitz

As two "feral and not trained" emus go on the lam in South Carolina, Feedback suggests that authorities read up on the war fought against wild emus by the Australians in 1932. They lost – but there may be some tips

The long history of robotics should teach us to be more sceptical when it comes to autonomous humanoid robots, says Nicole Kobie

From a scientific take on screen time to nuclear war, a look at why we age to the future of our oceans, our writers pick their favourite popular science books of the year

Recent developments in AI and neurological research may prompt concern. However, placing outright bans on such research is unlikely to be the best solution - and may hold us back

Russia’s new ballistic missile flies on a high arc out of Earth’s atmosphere and releases multiple high-speed projectiles, making it challenging but not impossible to intercept

An analysis of hundreds of bromalites – fossilised faeces and vomit – shows how changes in diet enabled dinosaurs to take over the world in the early Jurassic

Physicists have long wondered why particles can only have an electric charge of +1, -2 or any whole number. Now we increasingly suspect that, actually, that's not true after all

Researchers have used lasers to encode information in diamonds, demonstrating record-breaking data density in an ultra-stable and long-lasting system

Food in the US has a bad rap thanks to outbreaks caused by bacteria, plus processing, additives and food dyes, but the food supply is actually much less risky than people think

Today's huge AI models are composed of several billion numbers known as weights and changing just one of them can destroy their ability to function, leading to “gibberish” output

About 40 years ago, researchers noticed a population of orcas had begun swimming around with dead fish on their heads, and now the craze is back

Swapping classrooms for the woods doesn't appear to improve most children's mental health, but they may still enjoy it

Reperfusion technologies that can reanimate human brains are raising the possibility that death could be a reversible condition, even hours after a cardiac arrest

Space-time may not be continuous but instead made up of many discrete bits – and we may be able to see their effects near the edges of unusually bright black holes