University of Manchester

​If you're trying to make an aircraft lighter, stealthier and faster, how about getting rid of the flaps on the wings and tail? That's what engineers from BAE Systems have done on a small scale. The resulting MAGMA UAV is instead controlled by air blown from its single jet engine.

​Graphene is already a rockstar of the material science scene, and we're starting to get a better sense of how it will shake things up beyond the lab. Shoemaker inov-8 has unveiled what it says is the first running shoe to use the material and promise an unprecedented degree of grip as a result.

Nowadays lions, leopards and cheetahs may be the dominant carnivores of Lesotho, Africa, but they all pale in comparison to what might have been the largest predator to ever stalk the continent.

It turns out you don’t need to dig around in the dirt to make new dinosaur discoveries: the back rooms of museums hold just as many secrets. Paleontologists have reexamined controversial old skeletons and confirmed them to be a distinct genus – a discovery that was made, and contested, decades ago.

A growing body of research is suggesting that brain inflammation could be responsible for some major depressive episodes. A new study from a team at the University of Manchester has now made an even more specific contention – linking brain inflammation to suicidal thoughts.

Fossils of the earliest lifeforms are relatively scant, but they did leave other traces of themselves behind. Now, paleontologists have discovered a set of tiny fossilized burrows, created by some of the earliest complex organisms more than half a billion years ago.

​The Lower Saxony State Museum is full of hidden discoveries lately. A plesiosaur skeleton gathering dust for years turned out to be a new species, and now on closer inspection, an Ichthyosaurus fossil in the museum's care has been found to be the largest specimen, and it was pregnant.

The good news may be 65 million years too late, but a new study indicates that you could outrun a Tyrannosaurus rex. By combining two separate biomechanical simulations, scientists have concluded that the giant meat eater couldn't move at much above a walking pace without its leg bones breaking.

A team of scientists from Britain and China have developed a new type of ceramic carbide that can withstand the high temperatures of flying at over five times the speed of sound without the degradation experienced by similar materials.

In 2008, researchers analyzed samples of protein preserved in T-rex bone, and came to the conclusion that the dinosaurs were closely related to modern ostriches. Now, palaeontologists have taken another look and found it is ostrich, thanks to some modern contamination.

Researchers at the University of Manchester have developed a graphene-oxide membrane with a scalable, uniform pore size that can filter out even the smallest salts, giving it potential for producing drinking water from salt water without affecting the flow of the water too much.

​​We are what we eat, but the way we eat it might have a say in the matter, too. Scientists in the UK studying the body's immune system have found that chewing can stimulate cells called Th17 in the mouth, in turn providing more robust protection against the harmful pathogens that cause illness. ​