What We're Reading

Physicist Christopher Monroe, CEO of quantum computing startup IonQ, notes that the field will see many incremental advances but warns that too much hype risks disillusionment that may slow the progress.

Networking is a crucial skill for all scientists. Here are some tips for those who struggle to make it work.

Sodium-based batteries hold promise as a solid-state alternative to lithium-ion batteries, but recharging tended to break them down quickly. A flexible anode that swells and shrinks with repeated charging could change that.

The formidable Tudor mathematician never published his work. Georgina Ferry relishes a fresh biography

"Over the next million years, internal rifting is projected to cleave the platypus into a species of duck and a fairly large rodent."

Revival of disembodied organs raises a slew of ethical and legal questions about the nature of death and consciousness.

In a series of six papers published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers with the Event Horizon Telescope — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes — unveiled the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

Under the right pressure and temperature, potassium can adopt a so-called chain-melt phase. It might exist in the Earth's mantle.

The brain-tingling feeling was a hard-to-describe psychological oddity triggered by melodious whispers and soothing sounds. Until, suddenly, it was a YouTube phenomenon.

A review of 2013 data from the Mars Express orbiter has verified the methane spike on Mars first detected by the Curiosity rover. But whether the methane was produced by a life form is unknown.