Cyanobacteria, as they still exist today, were the first organisms to carry out photosynthesis and release oxygen. Produced in primeval oceans about 2.5 billion years ago, this oxygen accumulated in ...

The discovery of bright yet stable pigments is vanishingly rare, making them hugely valuable. Now chemist Mas Subramanian is unpicking the atomic code of colour and homing in on our most-wanted hue ...

A subtle twist between atomically thin magnetic layers can generate unexpectedly large and complex spin structures.

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Telefónica and Liberty Global, the joint owners of Virgin Media O2, are set to lead a roughly £2bn acquisition ...

Microscopic ocean algae produce a huge share of Earth’s oxygen—but they need iron to do it. New field research shows that when iron is scarce, phytoplankton waste energy and photosynthesis falters.

DJ Elmoe knocked our socks off with footwork that still sounds as fresh as the first day we heard the style. Lindstrøm returned with the umpteenth coming of space disco and got us starry-eyed for the ...

Can you drill a hole in a cube that an identical cube could fall through? Prince Rupert of the Rhine first asked this question in the 17th century, and he soon found out the answer is yes. One can ...

Scientists have long sought to understand the quantum metric (QM)—a fundamental quantity that measures how rapidly neighboring electronic states in a solid change across momentum space. Predicted to ...

Rocks fractured by earthquakes could unlock a wide menu of chemical energy sources for microbes living deep underground – and similar processes could potentially support microbes within other planets.

In this study, chiral gold nanoparticles with a concave vortex cube structure were employed as the chiral substrate, exhibiting highly tunable optical chirality and intriguing chiral-induced spin ...