Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This question has puzzled scientists and curious citizens alike for many years.

The mere presence of a pair of eyes on a sign requesting donations makes people more likely to give more. This is according to a field study in Springer’s journal Human Nature. Lead author Caroline Kelsey of the University of Virginia in the US says the findings support the idea that people tend to act according to pro-social norms when they sense that they are being watched. It also suggests that eyes play a special role in promoting cooperation in humans. 

Researchers at the University of Sussex have become the first in the world to develop technology which can bend sound waves around an obstacle and levitate an object above it.

Results from a research study published in Nature Communications show how the inner ear processes speech, something that has until now been unknown. The authors of the report include researchers from Linköping University.

Stanford scientists have revealed the presence of water stored within a glacier in Greenland, where the rapidly changing ice sheet is a major contributor to the sea-level rise North America will experience in the next 100 years. This observation – which came out of a new way of looking at existing data – has been a missing component for models aiming to predict how melting glaciers will impact the planet.

Changes in Atlantic Ocean sea surface temperatures can be used to predict extreme climatic variations known as El Niño and La Niña more than a year in advance, according to research conducted at Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology and published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Economists have found that in the United States, watershed groups have had a positive impact on their local water quality. 

Shelled marine creatures living in increasingly acidified oceans face a fight for survival as the impacts of climate change spread, a new study suggests.

A line of zebrafish specially generated at the University of Oregon had a key role in discovering the cause of Saul-Wilson syndrome, a rare disease seen in just 15 cases worldwide.

The Arctic Ocean's blanket of sea ice has changed since 1958 from predominantly older, thicker ice to mostly younger, thinner ice, according to new research published by NASA scientist Ron Kwok of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. With so little thick, old ice left, the rate of decrease in ice thickness has slowed. New ice grows faster but is more vulnerable to weather and wind, so ice thickness is now more variable, rather than dominated by the effect of global warming.