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Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
ETH Zurich isotope measurements on half a gram of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample overturn the idea that Bennu formed late and far out, and suggest it holds the original recipe for rocky planets.
A Chengdu-led team combed 17 years of data from stations in China and South Korea and found the mountain's own weight is slowly squeezing the shattered rock into faults. The tremors could make it harder to tell old bomb damage from a new test.
The August 31 burn was more than 99 percent accurate. Goddard's center director credited 'exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX.' A second burn later this month is expected to add four more years.
The sensor uses nitrogen-vacancy defects in diamond, needs no cryogenic cooling and no magnetic bias field, and was built as a fiber endoscope. It is still less sensitive than SQUIDs, but a flux concentrator could boost the signal more than 100-fold.
PANXEON reads three signals at once, two kinds of microRNA and the CA19-9 protein, and lets an AI combine them into one risk score. Only 14% of pancreatic cancer patients survive five years, mostly because 90% are found too late.
'At first sight, I thought it was just two whales resting on the surface.' The study, published Wednesday in Discover Animals, says she never tried to lift the calf, suggesting she knew it was dead soon after birth.
An Intuitive Machines image specialist spotted the fresh scar on Oct. 24, 2025, and 'dropped everything.' The blast churned the surface over 66 miles and left a 4-mile cold spot. The IAU has named it McGetchin.
An ESA-led team stitched together 45 surveys from 27 satellites to push the record back to the 1970s. The ice sheets were stable through the 1990s, then 'it really kicked in during the 2010s.' A brief pause from 2020 to 2023 is over.
It's the first actual number for a tyrannosaur's body heat. The isotope 'thermometer' needed 90% less enamel than a decade ago, which is what finally persuaded the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to let them drill Thomas the T. rex.
Elias 2-24 b beat the previous record for the youngest known planet by more than 4 million years. It was found in decade-old Keck archive images, in exactly the gap in the star's disk that ALMA spotted a decade ago.
The 1,800-year-old papyri were carbonized under 20 meters of ash from Vesuvius in 79 CE, and carbon ink on carbon paper is nearly invisible to X-rays. The new PLOS One study proposes screening the library for lead first, then virtually unrolling only the scrolls that have it.
Microscopy and 3D models of 18 figurines from the Mizyn campsite show the Schreger and Owen lines inside ivory were copied onto the surface, an eastern tradition that predates Western Europe's.
The INAF-led VST survey reached depths the Rubin Observatory won't hit for years. The satellites around NGC 5084 appear to line up in a plane, the same puzzling arrangement seen around the Milky Way.
GPS collars from the Zambian Carnivore Programme and Montana State tracked young Lycaon pictus leaving their packs to find mates. The three males made it to a new home in the Luangwa Valley; the females never found a pack.
Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, a 240-million-year-old tusked herbivore, ties Tanzania's fossil beds to Brazil and Argentina. The rocks that were supposed to hold the earliest dinosaurs can no longer claim the title.
BioPykrete revives a World War II idea at the molecular level: a protein with one end that grips ice and another that grips cellulose stops cracks from racing through the material. The team says it could one day be a building material for the Arctic and Antarctic.
The IC 348 panorama shows newborn stars firing jets into the surrounding gas, two protostars with nearly parallel outflows, and a planet-mass object that appears to have its own disk. The lightest brown dwarfs also carry an unidentified hydrocarbon in their atmospheres.
The first continent-wide map of grounded icebergs, built from Sentinel-1 radar images by a University of Tasmania master's student, finds 80% of them crowded onto 14% of the coastline. The small ones are the ones most likely to melt loose first.
Landauer's principle says computing gets cheaper the colder it runs. Michael Garrett argues a computation-dominated civilization would dump its waste heat at 5 to 30 kelvin, in the far infrared and submillimeter, where no SETI survey has ever looked.
The Moon has no air, no water and no plate tectonics, so a micron-sized grain of alien ceramic or graphene could survive there for a billion years. A trillion grains per cubic meter means the search would have to be run by AI.
NGC 1068 is 45 million light-years away and one of the best-studied active galaxies in the sky. The hidden component moves 300 km/s faster than the visible one, tops 2,000 km/s and is escaping the galaxy for good.
Fourteen tail vertebrae and a set of chevron bones from a single animal, excavated at La Tejería in Teruel, place the giant as a close relative of Diplodocus hallorum. The find, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, redraws the Late Jurassic map.
