According to the Animal Humane Society, 1 in 3 pets go missing during their lifetimes. But as technology has progressed, so have resources for finding lost pets.

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AI is nearly exclusively designed by men – here's how to fix it

China is pledging to use ‘extraordinary measures’ to support the country's bid to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, quantum technology and other cutting-edge technological fields, according to its 15th five-year plan.

Quantum computers are already here, but they make far too many errors. This is arguably the biggest obstacle to the technology really becoming useful, but recent breakthroughs suggest a solution may be on the horizon.

The Chinese government is ramping up its support for science, announcing plans to boost two key budgets at the country’s biggest political meeting called the Two Sessions.

Nearly half of biomedical scientists worry preprints could spread shoddy research and misinformation, according to a new survey that could help explain why the life sciences have taken up the publishing practice more slowly than some other fields.

In 2008, researchers reported the first ever synthetic genome of a living organism, which was produced by synthesizing the 580,000-nucleotide genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium. Now, researchers have used AI to design whole genome sequences, including one inspired by the M. genitalium.

On 27 February 1996, Japanese game designer Satoshi Tajiri released the first ever Pokémon games for the Nintendo Game Boy. What started as a childhood passion for collecting insects grew into a giant franchise and global phenomenon with themes of science at its heart.

Italy promised durable Olympic medals. Science had other plans

Nearly two years after Google DeepMind released an updated AlphaFold3 geared at drug discovery, its biopharmaceuticals spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, announced an even more powerful artificial-intelligence model — and they’re keeping it all to themselves.

As generative artificial-intelligence models become more sophisticated and eat up more energy to produce images and videos, the electronic chips that power them are reaching their limits of speed and efficiency. Optical chips could solve these problems, say researchers working in the field.

A time crystal more complex than any made before has been created in a quantum computer. Exploring the properties of this unusual quantum setup strengthens the case for quantum computers as machines well-suited for scientific discovery.

È importante ricordarlo non soltanto come autore di due libri fondamentali sulla deportazione, ma anche come un intellettuale che ha saputo trasformare la scrittura in uno strumento di indagine storica e di testimonianza giuridica

A report filed by SpaceX with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late December reveals some startling information – including that its Starlink satellites had to perform about 300,000 collision-avoidance manoeuvres in 2025.

Schrödinger’s cat just got a little bit fatter. Physicists have created the largest ever ‘superposition’ — a quantum state in which an object exists in a haze of possible locations at once.

Modern science journalism is increasingly crossing into advocacy, risking a "tyranny" over the scientific process that prioritizes narratives over evidence unless stricter ethical boundaries and transparency are restored.

Seas will rise this century—but not uniformly like water in a bathtub. In the very places where glaciers are melting and shrinking, the land beneath will rebound as the burden eases, meaning seas may fall even as the meltwater causes them to rise elsewhere.

How rife is the problem of ‘toxic masculinity’ in Western societies? A research study run in New Zealand has found that only a small percentage of men surveyed fell into the worst category of hostile toxicity.

We are still at the early stages of another big shift in technology (Generative AI) which threatens to upend the news industry by offering more efficient ways of accessing and distilling information at scale.

As artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT gain footholds across companies and universities, a familiar refrain is hard to escape: AI won’t replace you, but someone using AI might.

A trip to Pompeii’s public baths meant taking a dip in water contaminated with sweat and urine – until the Romans took over and sanitation improved.

Benchmarks reveal how artificial-intelligence systems reinforce discriminatory social hierarchies.

A leading artificial intelligence expert has rolled back his timeline for AI doom, saying it will take longer than he initially predicted for AI systems to be able to code autonomously and thus speed their own development toward superintelligence.

Does the open science movement produce the benefits its supporters claim, such as accelerating discovery and promoting science literacy? The answer is a qualified yes, according to one of the most comprehensive, multifaceted studies of the complex and divisive issue.

“There’s a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers”

The start of a new year can seem like the ideal time to make a fresh start – to shrug off the worries and pressures of the previous 12 months and view the world in a different way.

Whether quantum computers can actually solve practical problems is one of the biggest unanswered questions of this growing industry – and one that might be answered by researchers in industrial and medical chemistry in 2026.

Science editors pick their most memorable stories of the year

A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 390, Issue 6779.

Earlier this month, Xing, Knight and their colleague Bruno Bingley published a paper in the journal Buildings & Cities, with preliminary data gleaned from 18 organ-tuning books. The records date back to 1966 and indicate a rise in average temperatures since then, during winter and summer periods.

Newly published research has revealed a "mysterious mass burial event" in the south of Scotland about 3,300 years ago.

More than 50% of researchers have used artificial intelligence while peer reviewing manuscripts, according to a survey of some 1,600 academics across 111 countries by the publishing company Frontiers.

Psychedelic therapists, practitioners and academic researchers are beginning to recognise that mind-altering drugs can open up sides of the self that previously lay hidden, challenging entrenched understandings of gender and sexual orientation.

“The entire universe may operate like a giant computer,” says Melvin Vopson at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He believes there are already important clues suggesting it is correct – and he has even proposed how we could find out the truth with an experiment.

The use of impact factors in the evaluation of researchers has contributed to the distortion of scientific publishing practices and, in turn, of research practices.

This study examines the complex intersection of AI and science, with a specific focus on the challenges posed to copyright law and the principles of open science.

Will computers ever match or surpass human-level intelligence — and, if so, how?

To understand how this will affect research and what could be used in place of animal models, Madeleine Finlay hears from science editor Ian Sample, Prof Hazel Screen of Queen Mary University London and Prof Kevin Harrington from the Institute of Cancer Research

Dozens of academics have raised concerns on social media about manuscripts and peer reviews submitted to the organizers of next year’s International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), an annual gathering of specialists in machine learning.

The emergence of the neurodiversity movement is challenging the view of ADHD as a disorder that should be ‘treated’, and instead proposes that it’s a difference that should be better understood and supported — with more focus on adapting schools and workplaces, for instance.

“This could be a crucial breakthrough in unraveling the nature of dark matter”

Scientists have identified five major “epochs” of human brain development in one of the most comprehensive studies to date of how neural wiring changes from infancy to old age.

Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been told to phase out all of their monkey research. The directive, communicated to CDC staff by a top official at the agency, will end studies on approximately 200 macaques.

After years of hype and ballooning investment, the boom in artificial intelligence technology is beginning to show signs of strain. Many financial analysts now agree that there is an ‘AI bubble’, and some speculate it could finally burst in the next few months.

Researchers have devised an artificial intelligence (AI) that can identify signs of ancient life in rocks of unknown provenance, based only on the pattern of chemicals left behind as biomolecules degrade over eons.

Researchers gave an AI data from physics experiments involving systems using pendulum-like motion to see if it could derive basic laws of physics.

Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio has become the first person to have their work cited more than one million times on the search engine Google Scholar.

The atmospheric tracking raises hopes that a system such as Guardian could detect tsunamis as they emerge on the open ocean

In a handful of academic laboratories and companies, researchers are growing human neurons and trying to turn them into functional systems equivalent to biological transistors.