Virus (purple) circulating in the bloodstream recognised by antibodies (yellow) of the immune system. In a dramatic breakthrough that could affect millions of lives, scientists have been able to show for the first time that the body’s immune defences can destroy the common cold virus after it has actually invaded the inner sanctum of a human cell, a feat that was believed until now to be impossible. The... 

Spirit, the poor Mars Rover that’s been stuck in Martian sand since last year, has actually contributed to a pretty fantastic discovery in its sedentary months: the evidence of subsurface water on Mars. To recap: Spirit, one of two plucky Mars Rovers that had finished their initial missions in 2004 and had embarked upon, as NASA calls them, “bonus missions” ever since, slipped through... 

Leaked screenshot of future Windows 8 In its most concrete comments yet about the next version of Windows, Microsoft said in a blog post on its Dutch Web site that Windows 8 is about two years from hitting the market. Microsoft is working on the next version of Windows, the blog says in Dutch, but it will be about two years before Windows 8 is on the market. Microsoft’s Dutch subsidiary posted... 

Mirko Hannemann, chief executive of DBM Energy, gets out of the "Lekker Mobil", an Audi A2 with an electric engine, in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate on Tuesday. The electric car drove 600km (372 Miles) from Munich in southern Germany to Berlin without recharging its battery, setting what organisers hailed as a new world distance record for an everyday vehicle. An electric car drove... 

Bumblebees can find the solution to a complex mathematical problem which keeps computers busy for days. Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway, University of London have discovered that bees learn to fly the shortest possible route between flowers even if they discover the flowers in a different order. Bees are effectively solving the ‘Travelling Salesman Problem’,... 

This undated handout illustration shows the DNA double helix. A Japanese has joined the elite club of humans whose genetic code has been fully sequenced, according to research unveiled on Sunday. A Japanese has joined the elite club of humans whose genetic code has been fully sequenced, according to research unveiled on Sunday. The unnamed male gave a sample of DNA which has been unravelled to show... 

The annual Small World Photomicrography Competition sponsored by Nikon aims to showcase “the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope.” Indeed, the 2010 winning photographs reveal what’s not seen or visible to the human eye. While many of the stunning images were taken to advance science, some are just simply beautiful to look at. The following photos were... 

Thirty five years ago yesterday, we could only imagine the view from the surface of another world. But Russia’s Venera 9 probe changed all that, beaming back the first ever photo of another planet—25 million miles away. By 1975, the moon was no longer a frontier. It had been landed on, hopped across, analyzed, filmed, photographed, and dug into. The next step wasn’t the tiny rock orbiting... 

The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport is among the most rare production cars in the world, with perhaps only 40 manufactured. Dan Neil, automotive critic of the Wall Street Journal, is the first journalist to test drive the powerful machine that recently set the speed record for a production car at 268 mph. Neil, who won the Pulitzer Price for criticism in 2004, concludes his review with the paragraph:... 

Canon has unveiled its Cross Media Station, an inductive charging station, which allows users to download images and simultaneously charge digital cameras and camcorders by placing them on top of the device. The tabletop box also allows users to share photos and videos to other users, and features facial recognition which scans both video and picture files to recognise the same person in the footage... 

Google’s project to design driverless vehicles raised several questions about the future of driving. But it also raised a more topical question: Are Google’s heavily-modified driverless vehicle prototypes even legal? We found out. Researchers have been working on driverless vehicles since the late 1970s; European governments spent nearly $1 billion in the 1980s and ’90s on automated... 

A conspiracy theorist noticed that an image in NASA’s Astronomy Picture Of The Day had noticeable Photoshop brushstrokes in it, when you turned up the contrast. Is there a mysterious object hiding near Saturn’s moons? Check out the official image of Dione and Titan, above. A YouTube user named DominatorPS3 turned up the contrast on the image, and discovered brush strokes. You can just... 

The Soviet lunar program was covered up, forgotten after failing to put a man on the moon. These rare photos from a lab inside the Moscow Aviation Institute show a junkyard of rarely-seen spacecraft, including a never-to-be-used Russian lunar lander. Soviet scientists were well ahead of their American counterparts in moon exploration before President John F. Kennedy pronounced the U.S. would put a... 

Using our current technology, it would take 180,000 years to reach Zarmina. But our resident physicist Dave Goldberg has a more optimistic estimate – thanks to antimatter and time dilation, astronauts could get there in just a few years. Dave calculates that, if we could build a stellar drive that gets its fuel from matter-antimatter explosions, then it would be possible to travel to Zarmina... 

Russian company Orbital Technologies has announced it will have a space hotel in orbit possibly by the end of 2015. This will be the first hotel of its kind, revolutionising tourism and launching the massive commercialisation of space travel, another first for Russia’s eternally pioneering space program. Russia was the first nation to conquer space, was the first to orbit the Earth and the Moon,...