A bouncing ball eventually will roll to a stop. After a long day of scrolling, a phone battery will die. Eventually, every campfire will burn out. In each case, it seems like some energy disappeared.

Imagine a situation that makes your heart race. Maybe it’s sitting down to take a test. Or stepping on stage to perform in a recital. Or working up the nerve to talk to your crush. Such stressful ...

Dark matter isn’t the universe’s only “missing” matter. Distant bursts of radio waves have now turned up vast, faint gas ...

Society has tended to describe adulthood as starting at around 18 to 21. And most people may appear fully adult by then. But such looks can be deceiving. The brain won’t reach its adult form until ...

Three species picked their favorite human targets based on skin odor and bacteria. The findings could help design better ...

The wild world is full of roars, whoops and songs. Scientists are using such sounds to guide efforts to help save species at ...

To cut their wastes to nearly zero, circular cities are launching projects to repair, reuse and recycle virtually everything.

Meteorites that are billions of years old. Alienlike worms. A blue whale’s massive jaw bones. These are just some of the millions of marvels at the Smithsonian Institution. Most are part of the ...

In X-Men, Warren Worthington III sprouts huge white wings from his back and shoots into the sky. Scientists have yet to fully turn that comic-book trick from fiction to fact. But virtual reality, or ...

Researchers recently learned that bees can swim. New findings show that bees paddle toward shade and dark to reach shore.

Some hydrogels are made of natural polymers. Jell-O is a good example. It contains a natural polymer called gelatin. Other ...

Simone Biles has nothing on this tiny backflipper. The globular springtail (Dicyrtomina minuta) is so small it could straddle the tip of a pencil. Yet this insect-like animal can vault itself 62 ...