Researchers have discovered a new, exotic class of planets outside our solar system. These so-called super-Earths were formed at high temperatures close to their host star and contain high quantities of calcium, aluminium and their oxides – including sapphire and ruby.

21 light years away from us in the constellation Cassiopeia, a planet orbits its star with a year that is just three days long. Its name is HD219134 b. With a mass almost five times that of Earth it is a so-called “super-Earth...

New battery-free, easily implantable weight-loss devices developed by engineers could offer a promising new weapon for battling the bulge. In laboratory testing, the devices helped rats shed almost 40% of their body weight. Results of the study were published today (Dec. 17, 2018) in the journal Nature Communications.

Measuring less than 1cm across, or about a third of the area of a U.S...

Rare relic is one of only three fossil clouds known in the universe. A relic cloud of gas, orphaned after the Big Bang, has been discovered in the distant universe by astronomers using the world’s most powerful optical telescope, the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii.

The discovery of such a rare fossil, led by PhD student Fred Robert and Professor Michael Murphy at Swinburne University of Technology, offers new information about how the first galaxies in the universe formed...

A new test for cervical cancer was found to detect all of the cancers in a randomised clinical screening trial of 15,744 women, outperforming both the current Pap smear and human papillomavirus (HPV) test at a reduced cost, according to a study led by Queen Mary University of London.

The study, published in the International Journal of Cancer, compared a new ‘epigenetics-based’ cervical cancer test with Pap smear and HPV tests, and investigated how well it predicted the development of cervical cancer up to five years in advance in a large study of women aged 25-65 in Canada.

As opposed to checking for patterns in the DNA genetic code itself that are indicative of the HPV virus, the new test looks at the naturally-occurring chemical markers that app...