A UC Riverside astrophysicist modeled how a hypothetical Venusian moon would have behaved, and found the planet's sluggish spin would have dragged it inward to a fiery collision rather than letting it drift away.
Researchers say lymph-node-like structures tucked in skull bone marrow act as a rapid first-responder defense for the brain, and blocking them let tumors grow faster in mice.
By decoding signals from individual neurons in a mouse's visual cortex, researchers produced 10-second video clips of what the animal was actually seeing, and the results don't quite match reality.
A UCSF-led team built a brain-computer interface that decodes speech and hand gestures from a single implant at once, letting a virtual avatar wave, nod and talk within seconds of a patient's intent.
A Vega-C rocket's first double-satellite flight put ESA's plant-fluorescence probe FLEX and a new Copernicus ocean sentinel into orbit before dawn Tuesday.
Cockroach milk, splash-free urinals and a study on snake-taunting took top honors as the satirical science awards held their first ceremony outside the United States.
A reanalysis of 1,700-plus exploded stars suggests cosmic expansion could be slowing, not speeding up — but a competing paper in the same journal issue says acceleration still holds.
Impact-crater clutter was hiding much of Mercury's contraction from view, a new study finds, pushing the planet's total shrinkage up to 23 kilometers since it formed.
A million-person analysis finds hundreds of new genetic links to the 'Big Five' traits — but researchers say DNA still explains only a small share of who we are.
A newly identified atmospheric wave rivals the planet's famous northern hexagon — and unlike its twin, is still taking shape.
Zurich hosted the awards for research that makes people laugh, then think — including a scientific definition of kissing and a splash-free urinal.
Camera traps and DNA testing confirmed Australia's second-smallest rock-wallaby at two Kimberley sites where it hadn't been recorded in decades, a rare bright spot for a species conservationists feared was vanishing.
A two-paper study places Denisovans in subtropical China for the first time, with cut-marked animal bones showing they hunted large game across a 120,000-year record.
University of Maryland biologists say combinations of natural toxin-blocking proteins from rattlesnake blood fully neutralized venom lethality in laboratory tests, though human trials are still years away.
Princeton physicists tested a machine-learning control system, called PACMAN, that predicts and heads off dangerous plasma disruptions faster than any human operator could react.
A beach-ball-sized rock became only the 13th asteroid ever detected before hitting Earth's atmosphere, a small trial run for spotting bigger threats.
A single, unusually energetic particle strike in an underground xenon detector has physicists intrigued — but far from convinced they've glimpsed the universe's missing mass.
A newly identified atmospheric wave, dubbed a decagon, gives Saturn's southern hemisphere its own geometric counterpart to the ringed planet's famous northern hexagon — and it wasn't there when Cassini flew by.
Princeton researchers tested a machine-learning framework called PACMAN on a live tokamak, where it read plasma conditions and issued corrections in about 20 milliseconds — fast enough to head off an instability before it could damage the reactor.
A newly emerged ten-sided jet-stream pattern is the first large, regular polar feature astronomers have documented in Saturn's southern hemisphere — and unlike its famous northern cousin, it appears to still be growing.
A decade of geomagnetic data from a Scottish observatory yielded the tightest constraints yet on ultralight axions — and dozens of unexplained signals that are not, researchers stress, confirmed detections.
Botanists in Thailand have described a leafless, chlorophyll-free plant with a demonic, horned bloom — and fewer than 50 individuals are known to exist.
A UC San Diego structural study finds that ordinary RNA polymerase transcribes synthetic 'hachimoji' DNA letters using much the same molecular grip it uses on natural genes.
Isar Aerospace's Spectrum vehicle lifted off from Arctic Norway with five small satellites Saturday, succeeding on its second try after a 2025 test flight ended in a crash near the pad.
A University of Miami study finds the bonnethead shark's signature head shape isn't a male trait that emerges at maturity — it's a juvenile feature in both sexes that rounds out faster in females.
A Nature study found the GLP-1 drug sold as Ozempic and Wegovy slowed physiological aging and extended survival in older female mice — but the single-sex, animal-only findings are far from proof it works the same way in people.
MBARI researchers got a rare live look at one of the ocean's strangest creatures — the first confirmed sighting of the elusive Magnapinna squid in the northeastern Pacific.
A newly discovered second set of antibody genes in the world's largest bat family could help explain how the animals tolerate viruses that sicken other mammals.
A newly confirmed decagon-shaped wave rings Saturn's south pole, and scientists don't yet know what's driving it — or whether it will last.
A study of more than 900 snake embryos found a newly identified tether inside the egg forces growing bodies to buckle rightward — the trick that lets snakes hatch as the longest-bodied vertebrates on Earth.
Washington State University researchers used an AI system to narrow more than 100 million possible print settings down to a handful that work on widely available machines, opening access to a copper alloy once printable only on specialized industrial equipment.
In November, a message from Voyager 1 will take a full 24 hours to reach home — a distance calculated to the second by NASA nearly 49 years after the probe's 1977 launch.
Columbia University researchers find human microglia take four to eight years to reach maturity, a pace they link to a gene duplicated only in humans and to our capacity for complex cognition.
A photographic analysis of 13 astronauts documents a previously unrecorded change in eyelid position during spaceflight — part of the broader syndrome of eye changes linked to time in microgravity.
A nationwide 'Proof by Underpants' experiment used decomposing cotton to measure soil biological activity at 1,000 sites — and found gardens beat lawns by a wide margin.
1.4-million-year-old tracks at Koobi Fora indicate Paranthropus boisei stood as tall as modern humans and may have moved in same-sex bands, researchers report.
Jessica Meir and Sophie Adenot spent six and a half hours outside the International Space Station replacing hardware, in only the sixth all-female spacewalk in the outpost's history.
A years-long survey of underwater mountains near Australia's Christmas and Cocos Islands turned up new sea cucumbers, fish and barnacles — plus a graveyard of ancient shark teeth.
A star discovered skimming past Sagittarius A* at more than 8 percent of the speed of light could let astronomers directly measure the black hole's spin for the first time.
A bilaterally split bobolink — male plumage on one side, female on the other — nested successfully at a Chicago-area preserve before migrating south.
Arriving nine months ahead of schedule, the infrared observatory is set to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy this weekend on a mission to map dark energy and hunt thousands of new worlds.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen receive the nation's highest spaceflight honor after their April test flight took humans farther from Earth than ever before.
A direct image from a telescope in Chile appears to confirm what astronomers have debated for nearly a century: the giant star Betelgeuse isn't alone.
The sharpest images yet of the sun have revealed tiny plasma vortices that may help solve a decades-old puzzle: why the corona burns far hotter than the surface below it.
Researchers say the rove beetles' unusually long, slender mandibles and antennae recalled the rubber-bodied manga protagonist's stretching powers.
Satellite radar tracked months of fracturing before a 76-square-kilometer slab of the glacier's floating tongue broke away on Aug. 4 — its biggest single loss since 2012.
A polydactyl Maine coon named Erebus Anomaly has the most toes ever documented on a cat, edging out a 24-year-old record and giving geneticists a fresh, harmless example of a favorite feline mutation.
Mission managers signed off Friday on final launch preparations for the wide-field observatory, which will hunt dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets from nearly a million miles from Earth.
A yellow-green mountain lizard found above 1,300 meters in western Thailand shares three traits with the HBO dragon it's named for: color, modest size and a knack for laying eggs.
Observations of a galaxy seen just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang reveal three actively feeding supermassive black holes, the first such system confirmed at cosmic dawn.
A new analysis of decade-old New Horizons images finds the first evidence that liquid, not just ice, has recently moved across Pluto's surface.
Comet 220P/McNaught has brightened roughly 20,000-fold since June, offering skywatchers an unexpected view of an object normally too dim to see without a large telescope.
A new study of Greenland sharks, the longest-lived vertebrates known, finds their retinas resist the decline that dims vision in nearly every other aging animal.
A survey of nine early, dormant galaxies found far more faint, low-mass stars than expected, suggesting some formed three to four times more massive than previously calculated.
Researchers in Denmark described a genus of rove beetles with unusually elongated mouthparts, naming it Luffy after the shape-shifting manga protagonist — and one new species after his strongest transformation.
More than 1,000 randomized computer models presented at a Paris origins-of-life conference show Earth-like planets emerging naturally from disk physics, without assuming our solar system's particular layout.
A century-old hypothesis gains its strongest evidence as the VLT directly images a faint, surprisingly massive star orbiting the famous red supergiant.
A new proposal from Monash University researchers would fold Australopithecus, Paranthropus and other fossil relatives into an expanded genus Homo, arguing 4 million years of evolution defies tidy categories.
Laser pulses that "shake" and then "listen" to a rare-earth crystal reveal that its two coexisting electronic phases rebuild through fundamentally different mechanisms, one gradual and one crystal-like.
Laser-driven shock experiments at pressures beyond Neptune's core show diamond stays crystalline right up until it melts into a denser liquid, closing a two-decade gap between lab data and theory.
A bone excavated at Los Angeles's La Brea Tar Pits in 1929 sat unidentified for nearly a century before researchers recognized it as an extinct spadefoot toad.
A black hole cloaked in dense gas may explain the mysterious 'little red dots' littering Webb's deepest images — and how the earliest supermassive black holes grew so fast.
A months-long survey of Angola's remote Lisima Plateau, closed off for decades by war and landmines, turned up new dragonflies, grasshoppers and dozens of moths and butterflies.
Ultraviolet light revealed the 244-million-year-old organs of Austronaga minuta, the oldest largely complete digestive system found in a reptile, showing archosaur guts started out simple.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed a 60-foot-wide pit gouged by a discarded Falcon 9 upper stage, giving scientists a rare, precisely timed impact to study.
NASA's Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot begin a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk this morning — one that could make Adenot the first Frenchwoman to walk in space.
A dying star deep in the galaxy's most hostile neighborhood is still manufacturing the raw materials of planets, upending assumptions about what can survive near a supermassive black hole.
Satellite alerts show clear-cutting down 36% from a year earlier, the smallest area lost since Brazil's current tracking system began.
A two-decade review of collision data from Brookhaven's STAR experiment suggests a Y-shaped tangle of gluons, not the three valence quarks alone, may carry a proton's defining quantum number.
The event, nicknamed 'the Whippet,' released roughly as much energy as 400 billion suns and may have left something behind.
A specimen collected three decades ago in Osaka has revealed four previously unrecognized bones, including the first confirmed mosasaur premaxilla found in Japan.
A newly analyzed explosion from a shredded star has emerged as one of the most luminous stellar events ever recorded, testing theories of how black holes consume massive stars.
CT scans of two of the world's only complete dodo skulls suggest the flightless bird navigated Mauritius by smell and twilight vision, not the bumbling stupidity of legend.
The NSF Inouye Solar Telescope has resolved plasma vortices as small as 20 kilometers wide on the Sun's surface, offering scientists a possible answer to why the corona runs a million degrees hotter than the surface below it.
CT scans of the world's only two known complete dodo skulls suggest the extinct bird relied heavily on smell and touch, and had a brain no less capable than its living pigeon relatives.
New data from ISRO's Aditya-L1 spacecraft gives solar physicists a fresh diagnostic tool for one of astrophysics' oldest puzzles: why the sun's corona runs far hotter than its surface.
JCB's Hydromax streamliner, driven by Andy Green, more than doubled the previous hydrogen land speed mark on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
New infrared images of the Lion Nebula reveal, for the first time, which grains of stellar debris survive a white dwarf's radiation blast — and which do not.
NASA chased totality with a research jet and dozens of scientific balloons as the sky over Greenland, Iceland and Spain went dark on Wednesday.
A total solar eclipse swept over Iceland and Spain hours before the year's best meteor shower reached its peak under dark, moonless skies.
The moon's shadow sweeps across Iceland and northern Spain today, giving researchers a rare window to study the sun's corona from European soil.
A creative reshuffling of onboard power aboard the 49-year-old probe frees up enough electricity to keep its three surviving instruments running, with the same fix planned for Voyager 1.
A rare pre-sunrise alignment of six planets and the year's darkest Perseid meteor shower bookend today's total solar eclipse, making it the busiest skywatching day in years.
A power-conservation maneuver will keep Voyager 2's three remaining science instruments running for at least an extra year, nearly 49 years after launch.
The Moon's shadow will sweep across Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain at sunset on August 12, giving roughly 15 million people a rare view of totality.
A narrow band of totality will sweep across Greenland, Iceland, Spain and Portugal on Aug. 12, followed almost immediately by the peak of the Perseid meteor shower under a moonless sky.
Researchers using the NSF's solar observatory in Hawaii released the highest-resolution imagery of the solar surface to date — two days before Europe's first total solar eclipse in decades.
A 360-degree panorama from a Martian valley shows thousands of small polygon fractures stretching to the horizon, the biggest such field the rover has recorded in 14 years on the surface.
The Moon's shadow will sweep from the Arctic through Iceland and northern Spain on August 12, the first total eclipse to cross mainland Europe since 1999.
Asteroid 2026 OE1, roughly the size of a passenger jet, passed within 1.8 million miles of Earth this week — one of five close approaches NASA tracked in a single week.
South Korea's Danuri orbiter has captured the first before-and-after images of the fresh crater a stray SpaceX rocket stage left on the Moon.
A rare stellar-shredding flare spotted 30,000 light-years from a distant galaxy's core has given astronomers their clearest look yet at a supermassive black hole wandering far from home.
New analysis of decade-old New Horizons images points to liquid nitrogen seeping through cracks in Pluto's Sputnik Planitia glacier, even as separate observations show the dwarf planet's atmosphere starting to thin.
Satellite magnetic data show a broad region of the outer core flipped from westward to eastward flow around 2010, coinciding with unusual behavior in the solid inner core.
High-resolution imaging of main-belt asteroid (44) Nysa revealed an unprecedented trilobate shape and a previously unknown small moon.
Stanford and Ben-Gurion University researchers have named the newly found self-destructing defense mechanism "ruptosis."
Danuri, South Korea's lunar orbiter, photographed the site where a fragment of a SpaceX rocket is believed to have hit the lunar surface on Wednesday.
A generative genomic model trained on millions of DNA sequences produced working bacteriophages for the first time, thrilling scientists and alarming biosecurity experts in equal measure.
The final release triples the size of any previous survey and hints at structure the standard model struggles to explain.