A newly identified trigger for one of nature's most common antiviral systems could one day help researchers engineer phage therapies that slip past bacterial immune defenses.
Using only its own archive for the first time, the CHIME telescope picked out a whisper-faint cosmic signal that could let astronomers probe the universe's accelerating expansion without relying on costly galaxy surveys.
A new 3D map of genome folding in octopuses, squid and cuttlefish shows how an ancient chromosomal shake-up rewired gene regulation near nervous-system genes.
Ultrafast X-ray snapshots reveal a fleeting chemical intermediate enzymes use to stitch together the ring at the heart of every natural penicillin, closing a question open since the 1980s.
From a biophysicist who almost deleted a cryptic email to a father who broke the news to his sleeping kids, the 2026 Nobel laureates' reactions have been as memorable as their research.
A new satellite-tracking method roughly halves the uncertainty in measuring how water and ice sloshing across the planet nudge Earth's center of mass away from its geometric center.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope examined debris disks around young stars and found chemical fingerprints of high-energy impacts between Mars-sized and Moon-sized planetary building blocks.
The stuffed Pokémon logged more than 1,000 orbits aboard the ISS this spring alongside a French astronaut. For World Space Week, the European Space Agency is sending it on a museum tour instead.
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel share the prize for inventing optogenetics, the technique that lets researchers switch individual brain cells on and off with light.
Francis Halzen's decades-old bet that ice at the South Pole could catch cosmic neutrinos has paid off with physics' highest honor.
A new study is the first to show an invertebrate using mirror reflections to solve a real-world foraging problem, researchers say.
BC200, a small gene active in neurons, has kept the ability to move through the genome long after evolution usually locks such genes in place — and researchers traced two of its jumps into a human virus.
A one-in-100-million white lobster named Casper has joined a University of New England genetics project aimed at decoding why lobster shells come in so many colors.
Commissioning checks on the fine-guidance system and a planet-hunting coronagraph show the newly launched observatory can lock onto targets with extraordinary steadiness, NASA says.
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer used Earth's gravity for a third time, bending its path and gaining speed as it inches toward a 2031 arrival at Jupiter's ocean worlds.
A genus revision in Australia turned up two new giant stick insect species — including one whose eggs have a structural 'lid' never recorded before in the order.
Comet 161P/Hartley–IRAS passed within 75.5 million kilometers of Earth this week, its closest approach since its 1983 discovery, though it remains visible only through telescopes.
More than 10,000 entries — a record for the contest — produced finalists including a panicked fish and a caiman with 1950s hair.
Four astronauts from the U.S., Canada and Russia linked up with the ISS less than eight hours after launch, breaking the agency's previous speed record for a crewed flight.
Two independent teams using Chile's Very Large Telescope and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope confirmed a faint gas giant that had gone undetected in more than a decade of archived images of one of astronomy's most-studied young star systems.
A rare diamondback terrapin born with two heads and six legs is thriving under round-the-clock care in Massachusetts.
An X-ray burst that lingered for nearly 10 minutes — far longer than any seen before — points to the birth of an ultra-magnetized neutron star more than 6 billion light-years away.
A 20-year-old Alaska brown bear bested a field of 16 contenders in the annual tournament celebrating pre-hibernation bulk.
Satellite tags on nine yellow-morph green turtles show the little-studied color variant stayed inside the Galápagos Marine Reserve for years, raising questions researchers can't yet answer.
A UK-led mission concept published in Nature Astronomy would orbit the Moon's radio-quiet far side, hunting for a 13.5-billion-year-old signal no telescope has ever directly detected.
Underwater speakers and a drone gave Florida Atlantic University researchers the first hard evidence that free-swimming sharks can pinpoint distant sounds, not just detect them.
Tohoku University researchers watched blood flow surge into mice's brains just before REM sleep, yet found the neurons' usable energy molecule unexpectedly drop — a paradox that could reshape how scientists think about the biology of dreaming.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Wide Field Instrument came online this month, beaming back blurry but real starlight as engineers begin months of fine-tuning before science operations start in 2027.
Two sister pygmy raccoons on the Mexican island were observed rolling paper waste into play balls, then passing the trick to a family member, a first documented case for the raccoon family.
The Jupiter-bound probe used Earth's gravity for a third time on Monday, a maneuver that saves years of fuel-hungry propulsion on its long journey to the outer solar system.
A five-country analysis of nearly 500 pet cats found many of the same mutations that drive cancer in people, giving veterinary and human oncologists a new shared model to study.
A faint ribbon of stars unraveling from a globular cluster in a distant dwarf galaxy gives researchers a new way to weigh invisible dark matter beyond our own galaxy.
Seismic images off Vancouver Island show part of the Pacific Northwest's megaquake-generating plate breaking into fragments over millions of years, not all at once.
An amateur astronomer scouting a Quebec camping trip on satellite maps noticed a strange circular shape near Lake Marsal. Two years later, scientists confirmed it as a 25-kilometer-wide crater from a 390-million-year-old asteroid strike.
New seismic images off Vancouver Island reveal a 75-kilometer tear ripping through the Juan de Fuca plate, evidence that the Pacific Northwest's subduction zone dies gradually rather than shutting down all at once.
Researchers used braiding and fusion of exotic non-Abelian anyons on a trapped-ion processor to complete a universal set of quantum gates, a milestone on the road to fault-tolerant quantum computers.
Researchers diving in Washington and British Columbia's Salish Sea identified the region's first new sea spider species in nearly a century, including a hairy-legged, red-eyed hunter and a parasite-covered relative.
The PRIMA observatory, the first mission in NASA's new Probe Explorers class, will hunt for the origins of planets, galaxies and black holes in light invisible to the James Webb Space Telescope.
German researchers found that oscillating spin systems inside an ordinary chip can synchronize across distances more than a thousand times their own size, echoing a 17th-century clock experiment.
Researchers testing whether people can perceive things during reported out-of-body experiences found no evidence for it — except for two participants who accurately described a room they never saw.
Mouse embryo experiments traced the forebrain and hindbrain to distinct progenitor cells, a split the researchers say echoes across roughly 550 million years of animal evolution.
A near-perfect course correction and a lighter-than-budgeted launch mass mean the newly launched observatory could keep operating well into the 2040s, NASA says.
Thirteen fatty acids give each cat a stable, individual scent signature, researchers in Japan, Germany and Spain report, explaining a kidney structure unexplained for over 100 years.
The Jupiter-mass world, caught still gathering gas from its birth disk, is forcing astronomers to rethink how quickly giant planets can form far from their stars.
Joël Lapointe was scouting a Quebec campsite on satellite maps when he spotted a giant circular scar that turned out to be the largest impact crater found in nearly a decade.
Genetic testing across ten remote breeding colonies shows gentoo penguins are really four separate species, including one never described before.
A new satellite-tracking technique shows the planet's center of mass oscillates seasonally by about half of what earlier measurements suggested, resolving a discrepancy that had puzzled geodesists for years.
A tiny spotted cat from Bolivia's cloud forests, named Leopardus tilcayo, turns out to be one of five distinct tiger cat species hiding under one name.
A new analysis of decade-old spacecraft images suggests nitrogen ice is melting and rising toward the surface of Sputnik Planitia, hinting at a dwarf planet far more active than its frozen appearance suggests.
A study of 143 biological puncture tools — tusks, quills, wasp stingers, even snail mating darts — finds none of them escapes a basic trade-off between piercing power and durability.
A Mayo Clinic-led study finds senescent cells rely on a mitochondrial metabolic signal, not just an immune alarm, to switch on inflammatory genes — and blocking it eased inflammation in aging mice.
A new isotopic analysis from ETH Zurich finds material from beyond Jupiter makes up less than 2% of Earth's mass, challenging long-held assumptions about where the planet's water came from.
A survey of 143 biological puncture tools — from elephant tusks to snail “love darts” — finds evolution keeps trading piercing power for durability, never settling on one perfect shape.
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.