How do you load a plane quicker? New research suggests a lengthy airport gate queues could be slashed by seating passengers according to their hand luggage.

Researchers in Germany have developed a way of enabling sleepers to control their dreams by applying electric current to the brain which prompts lucid dreams, involving a state of heightened awareness.

Polar bears may hold the answer to the obesity crisis in their genes, new research has shown.

A survey off the North Island's East Coast has uncovered a huge hidden network of frozen methane and methane gas.

It's one of NZ's biggest natural disaster risk zones. Now scientists hope to know more about a rare quake phenomenon happening off the North Island's Poverty Bay.

Kiwi experts are not surprised a manufacturer of toe-sock running shoes has revealed there is no scientific proof that wearing its product has added health benefits.

Kiwi scientists have been left unconvinced by a new US study suggesting the pest didymo is not a recently-introduced foreign invader, but the result of native species responding to environmental change.

Scientists say it’s common for people to see non-existent features because human brains are uniquely wired to recognise faces, so that even when there’s only a slight suggestion of facial features the brain automatically interprets it as a face.

Just how did the ancient Egyptians shift stones weighing as much as 2.5-tonnes with technology no more complex than a sledge?

A study into muscle movements in teen gamers may shed light on links between violent video games and real life aggression.

Dr Jim Sprott, crusading forensic scientist and controversial cot-death and road safety campaigner, has died in Auckland, aged 89.

One of the scientists designing the testing regime for synthetic drugs says trialling novel drugs on humans without testing them on animals first is likely to be considered unethical in NZ.

A Kiwi researcher has helped advance one of science's most intriguing concepts - using our DNA to reveal where we came from.

The damaged hearts of laboratory monkeys have been repaired successfully for the first time with human stem cells.

No one had known just what kind of weapon lay hidden off the coast of the South Island. Behind the unlikely facade of a harmless sea sponge lurked a fearsome cocktail of chemicals that had evolved over billions of years.

Scientists have modelled the effects of the strike of a giant asteroid, writes Akshat Rathi. The effects were so catastrophic that, along with the large earthquakes and tsunamis it created, this asteroid may have also set continents into motion.

A scientist is stepping back in time to solve the mystery behind a dramatic drop in the world's most threatened species of sea lion.

It was a bizarre phenomenon that troubled researchers for decades – a mysterious under sea 'quacking' heard every winter and spring in the depths of the Southern Ocean.

Graphene's reputation as a miracle material is well established but scientists have added another attribute to the carbon-derivative's Top Trumps card: you can make it using a kitchen blender.

As members of an elite band of cosmic explorers, they are among the few to have gone beyond the final frontier and looked down on the Earth from space.

Human cloning has been used to create stem cells from adults for the first time, in a breakthrough which could lead to tissue and organs being regrown.

A Taranaki farmer who became the first Kiwi to undergo a revolutionary heart procedure has joined a push for it to be made publicly available.