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Bone fragments from a cave in northern Spain suggest there were multiple hominin species living in western Europe around a million years ago

Scientists have struggled to explain why global temperatures have shot up in recent years, but ocean cloud cover has now emerged as a crucial piece of the puzzle

Sheets of bismuth, gallium, indium, tin and lead can now be made just a few atoms thick by crushing them at a high temperature and pressure between two sapphires

As a step towards a useful and ultra-secure quantum internet, researchers have created an operating system that coordinates connected quantum computers, no matter what hardware they use

Radical new insights from the science of interoception – how the body senses its internal state – explain the real reasons we feel tired all the time, and how to re-energise

Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a type of dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease, in 2007 – but an analysis of his Discworld books suggests there were signs of the condition a decade earlier

D-Wave's claim that its quantum computers can solve problems that would take hundreds of years on classical machines have been undermined by two separate research groups showing that even an ordinary laptop can perform similar calculations

Palaeontologists have discovered 66 three-toed dinosaur footprints in a slab of rock that has been on display for 20 years at a school in Queensland

Saturn has dozens of new moons, bringing it to a total of 274. All of the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometres wide, but at what point is a rock too small to be a moon?

Saturn has dozens of new moons, bringing it to a total of 274. All of the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometres wide, but at what point is a rock too small to be a moon?

Analysis of samples brought back to Earth from the asteroid Bennu reveal that it has a bizarre chemical make-up and is unusually magnetic

Farming arose on multiple continents among populations with radically different cultures and environments and with no means of communicating with each other – how did it crop up independently at about the same time?

Linguists, psychologists and experts in cultural evolution are discovering why we tell stories, how ancient the oldest ones are and why some tales run and run

A patch of old oak trees in the UK is helping scientists to predict how the world’s forests will respond to higher levels of carbon dioxide, a crucial question for our future climate

A highly pathogenic strain of bird flu is spreading south along the Antarctic Peninsula and could devastate populations of penguins and other seabirds

Men who had given blood more than 100 times in their life were more likely to have blood cells carrying certain beneficial mutations, suggesting that donating blood promotes the growth of these cells

A cargo ship carrying sodium cyanide collided with a tanker transporting jet fuel – scientists are warning of potentially severe environmental impacts

A 12-passenger “seaglider” that is part boat and part aircraft harnesses Cold War-era technology to fly just above the waves using only electric power

When downed trees are attacked by beetles, the wood becomes more flammable, demonstrating another way insects can alter the risk of wildfires

Quantum fridges, batteries and clocks are brilliant inventions but still limited in power. Now physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern is charting a path to take them to the next level