A SLAC-led team used X-rays at a French synchrotron to confirm altermagnetism, a magnetic class proposed in 2022 that could enable faster, more interference-resistant computer memory.
An unusually intense, climate-charged typhoon season has battered the Philippines, Taiwan, China and Japan for months, with forecasters warning the worst may not be over.
A new theoretical study shows that if a black hole spins fast enough, the usual thermodynamic barrier against splitting could fall away — though no one has seen it happen.
Years of radio observations show a telltale wake in the supergiant's outer atmosphere, bolstering the case for a stellar companion scientists have named Siwarha.
A four-day field observation found a bull and a male donkey from different herds seeking each other out daily — a pattern researchers say has never been described in scientific literature.
Improvements to the rover's self-driving software let it surpass Opportunity's old Mars mileage record in roughly a third of the time, validating autonomous navigation for future missions.
A study of 37 nearby low-mass galaxies found far less oxygen than stellar models predict, pointing to supernova-driven winds that blow the element out before it can accumulate.
Francis Halzen won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for championing the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic-kilometer detector frozen into the South Pole ice that opened a new window on the universe's most violent events.
New ancient-DNA analysis of a Gravettian-era woman buried in a French cave carries a genetic signature from groups living hundreds of miles away, challenging the idea that Ice Age communities lived in isolation.
Known for occasional bright fireballs, the shower peaks around Nov. 5 with little competition from moonlight ahead of next week's new moon.
Forecasters say the stratospheric disruption, expected around Nov. 4 or 5, would beat the previous earliest seasonal record by roughly three weeks.
A new theory from Southampton and IIT Kanpur gives a forgotten heavy neutrino a starring role in why matter won out over antimatter.
A new request for industry ideas could extend the 35-year-old observatory's life — or guide its final, controlled return to Earth.
NASA's Anil Menon and Canada's Joshua Kutryk spent more than seven hours outside the station installing a roll-out array that inches it toward a 30% jump in power — and toward its eventual retirement.
Nearly 200 countries agreed on a follow-up action plan to the 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework, but campaigners say pledges remain far below what's needed as species vanish at 100 times the natural rate.
The Japanese-led MMX spacecraft, en route since its mid-October launch, aims to land a rover on Phobos and bring 10 grams of its dust back to Earth in 2031 — a first for either of Mars's moons.
Dated to the Early Bronze Age by the shape of its cargo pots, the wreck near Kekova Island still holds traces of what it once carried, and will go on display in a new underwater museum.
After studying 75 meteorite falls, researchers found that melting and mid-air fragmentation, not evaporation, decide how much of a space rock survives to reach the ground.
Researchers fired ultraviolet lasers at helium atoms and found that coordinating two electrons, instead of one, pushes X-ray generation past a limit textbooks said was fixed.
Researchers found that the toxic skin secretions of Europe's black-and-yellow amphibian fluoresce for more than a day after leaving the salamander's body.
A genomic study of 163 ant species finds that mobile DNA elements surged in activity right after the extinction event 66 million years ago, just before ant lineages exploded into the thousands of species alive today.
TOI-561 b should have lost its atmosphere to its star's radiation billions of years ago. New observations suggest silicate clouds are reflecting about 75% of incoming starlight instead, keeping the molten world shielded.
Sotheby's had estimated the Nanotyrannus skeleton would fetch $6 million to $9 million. A paleontologist warns the record price shows fossils risk being "lost to research" when they end up in private hands.
More than 30 ceramic jars and three stone anchors lie 30 meters down near Kekova Island, in a wreck researchers date to roughly 4,500 years ago — older than the previous record holder by five centuries.
By correcting an 8-kilometer error in the location of an ancient Chinese capital, researchers reconstructed a total eclipse from 709 BCE and used it to measure Earth's rotation nearly three millennia ago.
A Jupiter-mass object appears to orbit a brown dwarf in a young star system, in what one researcher calls 'the first plausible detection of an exosatellite.'
Dwarf reed snakes in Southeast Asia can roll forward nearly four times faster than they can slither, while somehow keeping their heads pointed steadily in one direction.
Scientists in China have described a newly discovered fungus whose fruiting bodies can reach 50 centimeters tall, making it the largest known species in its entire branch of the fungal family tree.
Scientists have finally modeled the mysterious Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud, concluding it may form through a process textbooks describe but no one has ever actually observed on any planet.
The galaxy's light has traveled 12.5 billion years to reach us, showing astronomers a scene from just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang — and the clearest evidence yet of how supermassive black holes merge.
A century-old mystery spanning Papua New Guinea, China and the Philippines may finally have an answer — and it isn't psilocybin.
Seismic surveys of the mostly underwater caldera, which produced one of the largest eruptions of the last 12,000 years, offer scientists a rare look at how giant volcanic systems rebuild after catastrophe.
A lengthy briefing lays out revised architectures for both SpaceX and Blue Origin's lunar landers, with officials still targeting a 2028 Artemis IV landing despite lingering questions about refueling.
Despite lacking a neocortex entirely, carrion crows solved a classic decision-making task using the same mathematical logic as primates — just faster.
A compilation of nearly 2,900 supernovae spanning three decades adds to growing evidence that the force driving the universe's expansion may change over time.
New analysis confirms the Silverpit Crater, hidden 700 meters below the seabed, was carved by an asteroid strike roughly 43 to 46 million years ago that sent a towering wall of rock and water into the sky.
A 17-person expedition to a remote Pacific atoll spent days testing the long-debated 'Taraia Object' with sonar and a magnetometer before concluding it was driftwood-like debris, not Earhart's long-lost Electra.
JAXA's MMX spacecraft lifted off for a six-year round trip that will make it the first mission to both land on Phobos and return a sample to Earth.
Nearly 90% of participants in a two-year unconditional cash pilot adopted environmentally beneficial practices, University of Bath researchers found.
A University of Warwick survey of dead stars within 65 light-years of Earth has turned up a cosmic rarity — and hints that there could be many more.
A Purdue-backed expedition reached a remote Pacific atoll this week to examine the "Taraia Object," a shape in a lagoon that some believe is Earhart's Lockheed Electra. A rival explorer says it's probably just a coconut tree.
Three physicists who found that electrons in certain crystals can act like a ferromagnet while canceling out any net magnetic field will share the European Physical Society's 2026 Europhysics Prize for identifying altermagnetism.
Innsbruck researchers used alternating pulses of attraction and repulsion to push ultracold atoms into an orderly new phase of matter, with correlations unlike anything predicted by existing one-dimensional quantum theory.
An international team working a 130-million-year-old site submerged off Istria says the bones point to an undescribed sauropod, though the 'new species' label is still a field call, not a published finding.
A technique that tracks starlight as a planet crosses its sun has revealed that a puffy, Jupiter-sized world has a lopsided, wind-whipped atmosphere, confirming decades of theory.
A UC Riverside doctoral student folded 12 new Australian plant-bug species into a paper and used four of them to honor her own fandom.
University of Warwick astronomers modeled the true colors of dying stars and identified what may be the first confirmed green star, plus a strong contender for the reddest.
A new spectroscopic analysis of a gravitationally lensed quasar finds two actively growing supermassive black holes just 570 light-years apart, dating to when the universe was two billion years old.
Veterinarians at Artis Zoo say a southern ground hornbill is likely the first bird known to have both the upper and lower parts of its beak rebuilt with 3D-printed titanium prostheses.
A 15mm hole punched clean through a shoulder blade from Iraq's Shanidar Cave is pushing researchers to rethink how far back lethal human violence reaches.
A chance discovery in Kentucky led researchers to a new record holder from Tennessee -- and a theory that crayfish may have a hard size limit.
The millisecond-long signal, among the most energetic events in the universe, originated roughly 10.6 billion light-years away — more than double the previous distance record for a fast radio burst.
NASA's Mars rover surpassed the distance record set by Opportunity, doing in five and a half years what took its predecessor nearly 15.
A hypothalamic protein called Menin fell off with age in mice — and restoring it reversed cognitive and physical decline within a month, researchers say.
Rocket and Jinx's new infant, born Aug. 25, is already clinging, vocalizing and learning the ropes of troop life at the zoo's Wildlife Explorers Basecamp.
Unusually warm overnight lows across 43 states extended a 20-month streak of above-average temperatures, even as drought still covered more than half the Lower 48.
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel share the 2026 medicine prize for turning a light-sensitive algae protein into a tool that lets researchers switch individual neurons on and off.
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.