British butterflies could be under threat from increasingly frequent episodes of extreme weather. In fact, heat waves, cold snaps, and heavy rain may have already contributed to reported butterfly...

NASA's second eye: the James Webb Space Telescope is due for launch in 2018 Coming in 2019: The Solar System in 3D . A pair of telescopes could soon bring sights like comets, Saturn's rings and...

Side effect: Hexagonal layouts can get you out of a jam Life is sweet in the honeycomb. City planning has long depended on rectangular networks – they’re simple and, urban planners say, reduce...

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world

Bonobos (pictured) interbred with chimpanzees in the distant past Chimpanzees and their relatives bonobos are closer than we thought. Bonobos seem to have donated genes to chimps at least twice in...

La Garma cave has been sealed for 16,000 years Our Ice Age relatives from Spain seem to have been quite the daredevils. They appear to have hunted formidable cave lions, and used their pelts as roofs...

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world.

3D-printed matrix shrinks as the temperature rises Meet the incredible shrinking material. Most things swell when they warm up, creating engineering headaches, but now a 3D-printed material has been...

Much of the technology that dominates our world today had its beginnings in the 1980s, including PCs, video games, the cell phone – and 3D printing. When he invented it 33 years ago, Chuck Hull...

The lander may have been lost when it released its parachute There it is. New pockmarks on the surface of Mars appear to be related to the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander, which was lost shortly before...

Is another one around the corner? A dim binary star is behaving exactly as expected if it is about to explode as a " red nova ". If that happens, in 2022 or so it could shine as brightly as the North...

The grass is always greener... than the grain? When ancient hunter-gatherers first began to give up their nomadic life, they weren’t just chasing the grain. Rather than looking for big payoffs from...