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Tiny planets full of diamonds have been created in the lab

18 July 2018

Carbon-rich planets laced with diamond may orbit distant stars, and now we’ve many miniature versions of them by crushing and heating chemical powders

Drones are checking up on insurance claims to look for fraudsters

17 July 2018

Insurance companies are training hundreds of drone pilots to check property damage from the air to make sure claims are legitimate

Weird 'wind drought' means Britain's turbines are at a standstill

17 July 2018

Britain is experiencing a prolonged “wind drought” that has slowed or halted the blades on turbines around the country

Stone Age bakers made first bread thousands of years before farming

16 July 2018

Evidence of the first early bread suggests humans were baking with wheat and oats thousands of years before they began farming the cereals

Honeybees gang up to roast invading hornets alive — at a terrible cost

16 July 2018

The worker bees that form “hot defensive bee balls” are effectively kamikaze fighters, with the heat from the ball shortening their life expectancy

DeepMind AI takes IQ tests to probe its ability for abstract thought

14 July 2018

AIs that can match humans at abstract reasoning would be very useful, but testing them is difficult. Now Google DeepMind says it has a solution

Tiny sensors in your phone could be made from recycled wood

13 July 2018

Minuscule machines that act as sensors in smartphones and other devices can be made from crystals extracted from discarded wood instead of silicon

Artificial skin grown from spider silk could help heal wounds

13 July 2018

Wounds and burns could one day be treated by the material spiders use to make their webs

Dopamine levels in our brains affect the risks we’re happy to take

13 July 2018

The first brain-scanning study to track activity in the brain's decision-making centres during gambling shows fluctuations in dopamine levels affect risk-taking