Science

Webb telescope finds the scars of planet-shattering collisions across two dozen young star systems

Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have identified a rare class of dusty young star systems bearing the chemical fingerprints of violent impacts between Mars-sized and Moon-sized bodies, offering scientists their clearest look yet at the kind of collision believed to have formed Earth's Moon.

Squid bodies hide hundreds more hair cells than scientists knew, study finds

A first full-body map of the sensory cells covering squid skin turned up hundreds of previously undocumented hair cells — the same basic structures that let humans hear — giving researchers a new way to study how those cells work, and fail.

NASA, SpaceX launch Crew-13 to space station after three-week delay

A Falcon 9 carrying four astronauts lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Thursday, three weeks after a propellant leak grounded the mission, kicking off a roughly seven-month stay aboard the International Space Station.

Gut-targeted delivery could offer a needle-free path for mRNA vaccines and GLP-1 drugs

A Georgia Tech and Emory University study found that where a lipid nanoparticle is placed inside the gastrointestinal tract of mice determines which organ it reaches, opening a possible route to needle-free mRNA vaccines and metabolic drugs.

Long space missions linked to higher hip fracture risk in astronauts, study finds

A NASA-led study found that astronauts who spent more than 90 days in orbit suffered hip fractures at a higher rate, and at younger ages, than those on shorter missions or people who never left Earth.

Experimental antifibrotic drug shown to block a key form of cell-to-cell messaging

A University of Surrey study finds that SD-208, a compound developed to fight tissue scarring, sharply cuts the release of extracellular vesicles from heart cells by rerouting them into the cell's disposal system — a mechanism the researchers say is unrelated to the drug's original anti-fibrotic purpose.

Enceladus's ice geysers sort ocean chemicals into single grains, study finds

Cassini data and new lab experiments show Saturn's moon concentrates its ocean chemistry as spray freezes, a finding that could simplify the hunt for signs of life.

Giant rock carving in Sudan may depict an ancient Kushite ruler

A newly published survey of Sudan's Mahas region has documented a monumental petroglyph, later enclosed by a seventh-century church, that researchers say may be a rare portrait of a ruler from the Kingdom of Kush.

New Fossil Species Suggests Dinosaur Flight Evolved Twice, Independently

A newly described, 120-million-year-old fossil from northeastern China indicates that flight-related traits arose separately in birds and in a branch of their closest dinosaur relatives, rather than from a single shared origin, researchers report in Nature Communications.

Scientists in China identify new tick-borne virus behind unexplained fevers

A newly described pathogen, carried by a tick species already established across the eastern United States, turned up in roughly one of every ten patients tested for a related and more severe tick-borne disease.

South Korean researchers build a stacked chip that remembers motion as it happens

Engineers at KAIST, working with UNIST and POSTECH, layered ion-based transistors tuned to different response speeds into one 3D chip, giving wearable sensors a built-in sense of "just now" versus "a moment ago" without extra memory circuits.

Kidney and heart disease risk climbs fast after a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, study finds

A real-world analysis of more than 1.6 million patients, presented at Europe's largest diabetes conference, finds that within ten years of a type 2 diabetes diagnosis more than half develop chronic kidney disease, heart failure or die — with each condition accelerating the other.

ESA's Juice Spacecraft Slingshots Past Earth on Long Road to Jupiter

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer used Earth's gravity for a third assist Monday, a maneuver mission managers said replaced what would have been a much larger propulsive burn.

MIT team uses AI to make mRNA vaccines that survive a year without freezing

A machine-learning-guided redesign of the fatty capsules that carry mRNA lets vaccines withstand room temperature for up to a year, a shift that could ease delivery in places without reliable cold-chain freezers.

NASA-ISRO satellite tracks months of eruption at a reawakened Russian volcano

The NASA-ISRO radar satellite NISAR stitched 17 months of orbital passes into a time-lapse of Kamchatka's Krasheninnikov volcano, which began erupting for the first time in roughly five centuries days after a magnitude 8.8 earthquake in 2025.

Physicists Watch a Quantum "String" Snap Into New Matter

A 13-ion device at Duke recreated, in miniature, the process by which a stretched field of energy converts into new particle pairs — a snap otherwise glimpsed only inside colliders and in the instant after the Big Bang.

NASA's Crew-13 astronauts arrive in Florida ahead of Thursday launch to space station

Two NASA astronauts, a Canadian and a Russian cosmonaut reached Kennedy Space Center on Saturday to begin final preparations for a six-month mission to the International Space Station.

Astronomers Find a Planet Orbiting Its Star Backward, With No Culprit in Sight

A red dwarf system 72 light-years away hosts a small planet circling in the opposite direction to its star's spin — and for once, researchers can find no massive neighbor to blame for the tilt.

In a Stanford Lab, Sound Takes Its First Recorded Quantum Jump

A microscopic resonator wired to a superconducting qubit let researchers watch a single quantum of sound vanish from one energy state to the next, closing a gap that has stood since the same feat was performed with trapped ions and photons decades ago.

Scientists Describe Two New Sea Spider Species Found in the Salish Sea

University of British Columbia researchers say the finds are the first new sea spider species documented in the region in nearly a century.

Gravitational tug-of-war between Earth's core and mantle drives decades-long shifts in day length, study finds

A new analysis in Nature finds that gravitational pull between Earth's inner core and its mantle, not magnetic drag alone, is the dominant force behind multidecadal changes in the length of a day.

In a Material Already Inside Every Chip, Physicists Confirm a Rare Electrical Property

University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers show that hafnium oxide, the insulating compound inside the world's computer processors since 2007, is genuinely antiferroelectric, settling a decade-long scientific dispute and pointing toward smaller capacitors, refrigerant-free cooling and denser memory chips.

CERN Physicists Find Quantum Entanglement in Heavy Z Bosons

ATLAS and CMS researchers say paired Z bosons produced in Higgs boson decays show strong evidence of quantum entanglement, extending the effect to a new class of massive particles.

Arctic sea ice melt season stops lengthening after decades of growth, NASA-led study finds

A 45-year satellite record shows the Arctic melt season grew about 40 days longer since 1979, then unexpectedly leveled off around 2010, even as the region keeps warming nearly four times faster than the global average.

NASA Advances New $1.2 Billion Infrared Telescope Toward 2033 Launch

PRIMA, the first mission in a new NASA astrophysics class, will study a band of infrared light no dedicated space telescope has observed since 2013.

Japanese Researchers Trace Memory's Molecular Switch to a Single Protein

A study in fruit flies identifies the molecular mechanism behind synaptic facilitation, the split-second strengthening of brain signals that researchers say may be the physical basis of remembering "just now."

Amoeba Found Dividing at Record 145-Degree Heat, Redrawing Limits of Complex Life

A newly described species pulled from a California hot spring completes cell division at 63 degrees Celsius, forcing biologists to raise the known ceiling for eukaryotic life and giving NASA a fresh benchmark for habitability elsewhere in the solar system.

Stanford Physicists Watch Sound Take Its First Quantum Jump

A tabletop experiment at Stanford captured a single phonon vanishing from one energy state and reappearing in another in real time, completing a century-long quest and opening paths toward error-corrected quantum computers and cell-level biosensors.

City of Hope researchers say their PANXEON liquid biopsy, validated in nearly 1,800 patients, could help flag one of medicine's hardest cancers to catch early.

Amateur Astronomer's Campsite Search Uncovers 390-Million-Year-Old Crater

A circular feature spotted on satellite maps by a Quebec camper has been confirmed as one of Earth's largest known impact craters, dated to the Devonian period.

Astronomers find earliest known ancestor of a galaxy supercluster

A newly mapped clump of ten merging galaxy groups, seen as it appeared just 2.1 billion years after the Big Bang, is the most distant proto-supercluster ever identified, giving cosmologists a rare direct look at the universe's largest structures still being built.

Scientists Find Tens of Thousands of Organic Molecules Packed Inside Two Meteorites

A record-setting mass spectrometer and a single-molecule microscope reveal that two carbon-rich meteorites carry far more chemical complexity — and far less overlap with each other — than researchers had documented before, sharpening the picture of the raw materials delivered to the early solar system.

Black Holes of Every Size Follow the Same Rule for Launching Jets, Study Finds

Analyzing 20 star-shredding events, astronomers found that black holes big and small switch on radio jets at the same critical feeding threshold.

Stanford-led study finds the human brain is built from two separate organs, not one

Researchers tracing brain development back to its earliest embryonic stage found that the forebrain and hindbrain arise from separate, non-overlapping progenitor cells — a split preserved across more than 550 million years of animal evolution.

Physicists find that a little disorder makes complex networks more stable, not less

A Northwestern University study in the journal Science overturns a long-standing assumption that uniform components make power grids, brains, materials and ecosystems most reliable, showing that carefully limited differences can instead help them hold together.

NASA's Roman Space Telescope could operate for 22 years — double its planned lifespan

A flawless first course-correction burn left the dark-matter-hunting observatory with far more spare fuel than engineers budgeted, potentially extending its science mission well into the 2040s.

First Diplodocus fossil found outside North America unearthed in Spain

Paleontologists in Teruel identified tail vertebrae from a giant sauropod, the first confirmed evidence that Diplodocus roamed beyond its known range in the American West.

Personalized RNA drug shows a year of stability in rare inherited ALS

An emergency physician with a mutation found in fewer than 30 known ALS patients worldwide is showing steady nerve and lung function a year after starting a drug built specifically for his mutation, doctors reported this week.

Swiss physicists build cold muonium beam to put Einstein's gravity to a new test

A new technique for producing controlled beams of muonium, a hybrid matter-antimatter atom, could let physicists test within a few years whether gravity affects a "second generation" particle exactly as it affects ordinary matter.

Ice sheets have shed 11.3 trillion tonnes since 1979, most complete satellite record yet shows

A half-century satellite reconstruction of Greenland and Antarctica finds glaciers accelerating into the ocean are driving most of the loss, adding more than three centimetres to global sea levels and putting millions more people at risk of coastal flooding.

New Horizons Data Reveals First Evidence of Flowing Liquid on Pluto

A study led by the Southwest Research Institute finds that liquid nitrogen may still be rising through cracks in Pluto's giant glacier, suggesting the dwarf planet remains geologically active.

Genetic study splits South America's tiger cats into five species, naming one entirely new

A three-pound spotted cat that lived a decade at a Bolivian refuge, mistaken for a small housecat, has been named Leopardus tilcayo — the first new living cat species described in more than a century.

HIV antibody therapy may teach the immune system to control the virus for years, study finds

A new analysis of the Rockefeller-led RIO trial finds that HIV patients who already carry antibodies of their own against the virus stay off daily medication far longer after antibody infusions — one participant for more than three years — pointing toward a possible path to a functional cure.

A meta-analysis of 87 clinical trials found that whole-grain intake in that range delivered the clearest improvements in cholesterol, blood pressure, weight and inflammation.

Astronomers confirm youngest planet ever found, still forming around its star

Elias 2-24 b, a Jupiter-sized world less than a million years old, was found hiding in eight-year-old archival telescope data, beating the previous record for youngest confirmed planet by a wide margin.

NASA orbiter finds Moon's largest fresh crater, formed just two years ago

A rare, powerful impact carved a 222-meter crater into the lunar surface sometime in the spring of 2024, and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter did not catch it until researchers reviewing images noticed the scar more than a year later.

Swedish physicists cut quantum computing operation times by more than 1,000-fold

A theoretical method developed at Chalmers University of Technology compresses thousands of control cycles into one, a step researchers say could ease one of the central obstacles to fault-tolerant quantum computers.

Scientists map more than 1,000 overlooked brain proteins, tying one to Alzheimer's

A new atlas built from 480 postmortem brain samples has identified more than 1,000 previously undocumented "microproteins," including one that appears to disrupt energy production in the brain's immune cells when Alzheimer's disease is present.

Brain's Immune Cells Undergo Wholesale Turnover Starting in Midlife, Study Finds

A decade-long federal genome-mapping effort finds the hippocampus rewires its immune cells and genome architecture between roughly age 50 and 75, challenging assumptions behind Alzheimer's research.

Webb telescope finds smallest brown dwarfs yet confirmed, and an atmosphere that shouldn't exist

A new James Webb Space Telescope survey of the star cluster IC 348 has confirmed brown dwarfs as light as twice Jupiter's mass, along with an unexplained hydrocarbon signature that researchers say may define an entirely new class of object.

Brain implant lets paralyzed patients speak and gesture at once through a digital avatar

A UCSF-led study is the first to decode speech and body language simultaneously from a single brain-computer interface, revealing an unexpected overlap in how the brain encodes conversation.

Fast radio bursts offer astronomers a new way to trace the universe's missing matter

A Caltech-led study of about 100 fast radio bursts, published in Nature Astronomy, shows the millisecond flashes can measure how galaxies redistribute matter across the cosmos — a tool researchers hope will help pin down dark matter, dark energy and neutrino mass.

Ig Nobel Prizes leave the United States for the first time in 35 years, honoring cockroach milk and buried underpants

Citing visa risks for international winners and journalists under the current U.S. immigration climate, the satirical science awards moved their ceremony to Zurich, where prizes went to research on energy-dense cockroach milk, splash-free urinals and a precise scientific definition of a kiss.

Mercury has shrunk far more than scientists thought, new study finds

A reanalysis of decades of spacecraft imagery suggests impact debris has been hiding the true scale of Mercury's contraction, with implications for what lies inside the solar system's smallest planet.

Cheap smartphone attachment matches doctors in rural India cataract screening trial

A device costing under £150, clipped onto an ordinary phone, let community health workers screen for cataracts at rural Indian eye camps, with remote doctors agreeing with in-person exams on referrals 96 percent of the time.

ADHD Linked to Sharply Higher Rates of Gut Problems, Largest Review Finds

A pooled analysis of nearly 2 million people found constipation, irritable bowel syndrome and loss of bowel control all more common among people with ADHD, prompting researchers to urge doctors to start asking.