Science

Temperatures not much warmer than the planet is experiencing now were sufficient to melt a major part of the East Antarctic ice sheet in Earth's past, scientists reported Wednesday, including during one era about 125,000 years ago when sea levels were as much as 20 to 30 feet higher than they are now

A strange fossil that looks a bit like a giant leaf, or a fingerprint the size of a coffee table, has intrigued scientists for decades.

A planet-hunting orbital telescope designed to detect worlds beyond our solar system discovered two distant planets this week five months after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, officials said on Thursday.

If you give an octopus MDMA, it will get touchy and want to mingle. What sounds like the premise of a children's book set at Burning Man is, in fact, the conclusion of a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. Neuroscientist Gul Dolen, who studies social behavior at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and octopus expert Eric Edsinger, a research fellow at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, bathed octopuses in the psychedelic drug and observed the result.

Eliminating dead-but-toxic cells occurring naturally in the brains of mice designed to mimic Alzheimer's slowed neuron damage and memory loss associated with the disease, according to a study published Wednesday that could open a new front in the fight against dementia.

Urban air pollution, mostly from vehicles, is associated with an increased risk of dementia, according to research published Wednesday.

Aibo (pronounced "eye-bo") is a reboot of the robot dog Sony first introduced in 1999 and laid to rest in 2006 in a tragic round of corporate cost-cutting. This new litter goes on sale in the United States this week with much more lifelike movement, artificial intelligence and a cellular connection for a gobsmacking $2,900 each.

NASA's newest planet hunter telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has now shared the first science image that it captured as part of its initial round of data collection.

The trees are callery pears, the escaped offspring of landscape specimens and street trees from the neighborhood. With no gardener to guide them, the spindly wildlings form an impenetrable thicket of dark twigs with three-inch thorns.

Personality tests are hugely popular, though if you ask working psychologists, they'll tell you the results are little better than astrological signs.

Elon Musk attempted to write the next chapter in his quest to open up space to the masses by announcing on Monday night the first paying tourist that his company, SpaceX, would fly on a trip around the moon. Speaking at SpaceX's headquarters outside of Los Angeles, he introduced Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire entrepreneur who founded the fashion label, Zozo.

One of his rockets had just blown up, the fleet was grounded, and his launchpad was in ashes. But on that day two years ago, Elon Musk was undeterred. As critics pounced, Musk pressed ahead during a space conference to lay out his grand vision to colonize Mars in a speech he titled, "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species."

Germany on Monday rolled out the world's first hydrogen-powered train, signalling the start of a push to challenge the might of polluting diesel trains with costlier but more eco-friendly technology.

French researchers hoping to get an early warning on pollution in the ocean have found an unlikely ally in a mollusc more often destined for the dinner table.

Janet Jay not RoboCop or Darth Vader. But she shares a similarity with those characters: Her all-too-human body has been upgraded with a machine.