The new head of UK research has said that he won't centrally direct scientific research.

Just after it was formed, the moon’s magma ocean would have steamed out a sodium atmosphere on the hot, Earth-facing side, creating dramatic winds

A new experiment that makes the proton 30 billionths of a per cent lighter than before could help make sense of the glut of matter over antimatter in the cosmos

Frogs leaped to take advantage of the global catastrophe that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago

The huge diversity of frogs we see today is mainly a consequence of the asteroid strike that killed off the dinosaurs, a study suggests.

Space transmissions could slingshot around the sun for a signal boost, producing data rates fast enough to stream video from interstellar space

Stephen Hawking warns over Donald Trump's climate policy in a BBC interview marking his 75th birthday.

The suggestion that our universe has physical laws and constants inexplicably just right for life is in the ascendant. Expect a heated debate, says Geraint Lewis

Data from the Kepler space telescope show that exoplanets tend to be similar in size to their neighbours and regularly spaced, no matter the size of their star

Technology far exceeded expectations in LISA Pathfinder test.

Female first authors' work is cited less often.

Ramin Skibba enjoys a profile of the woman heading the search for life off Earth.

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Intense solar activity such as sunspots and solar flares subsides during solar minimum, but that doesn’t mean the sun becomes dull. Solar activity simply changes form.

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NASA will mark the worldwide observance of International Asteroid Day at noon EDT Friday, June 30, with a special television program featuring the agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office and other projects working to find and study near-Earth objects (NEOs). The program will air on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

The off-kilter tumbling of the magnetic bubble around Uranus may regularly let a barrage of charged particles from the solar wind flow in

At redshift z = 2, when the Universe was just three billion years old, half of the most massive galaxies were extremely compact and had already exhausted their fuel for star formation. It is believed that they were formed in intense nuclear starbursts and that they ultimately grew into the most massive local elliptical galaxies seen today, through mergers with minor companions, but validating this picture requires higher-resolution observations of their centres than is currently possible. Magnification from gravitational lensing offers an opportunity to resolve the inner regions of galaxies. Here we report an analysis of the stellar populations and kinematics of a lensed z = 2.1478 compact galaxy, which—surprisingly—turns out to be a fast-spinning, rotationally supported disk galaxy. Its stars must have formed in a disk, rather than in a merger-driven nuclear starburst. The galaxy was probably fed by streams of cold gas, which were able to penetrate the hot halo gas until they were cut off by shock heating from the dark matter halo. This result confirms previous indirect indications that the first galaxies to cease star formation must have gone through major changes not just in their structure, but also in their kinematics, to evolve into present-day elliptical galaxies.

The triplet LISA spacecraft, which will use powerful lasers to measure ripples in space-time from supermassive black holes, have been green-lit

Astronomers studying icy objects in a distant region called the Kuiper belt say an unconfirmed planet with similar mass to Mars could be responsible for tugging them out of alignment

Two new catalogues, based on data from ESA's Herschel Space Observatory, have been released to the scientific community. The point source catalogues are examples of a new type of data product from two of Herschel's instruments, SPIRE and PACS. These catalogues are part of the lasting legacy of the Herschel mission, and will further facilitate data exploitation and drive ongoing research.