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Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
Satellite and ground magnetic data going back 28 years caught a huge patch of Earth's outer core swinging from a weak westward drift to a strong eastward one — and then fading again after 2020.
Astronomers measured the gravitational redshift of SDSS J0608−0059 and found it sits on the wrong mass-radius curve for an ordinary white dwarf — evidence it came from a single massive star, not a merger.
A study in Physical Review Research shows that highly organized particle motion looks nearly identical to random scattering once a spacecraft's limited resolution smears out the fine structure.
Levent Alpöge used Claude Fable 5 to find a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture — a problem on Stephen Smale's list of the century's great unsolved questions. The formula is short enough to fit in a single social media post.
More than 100 specimens dated to 567 million years ago include six groups never before found in North America, and evidence that early animals moved, reproduced sexually and built recognizable body plans earlier than thought.
WatchThe discarded Falcon 9 upper stage that launched two private lunar landers in January 2025 drifted for eighteen months and hit near Einstein Crater at 6:35 UTC Wednesday. Nobody photographed the collision, but the Very Large Telescope read its chemical signature.
Researchers listening to ocean waves and traffic through 60 seismometers mapped a molten reservoir 8 to 15 kilometers under one of Italy's most visited regions. They say it is not about to erupt.
Researchers at Michigan State and the Czech Academy of Sciences traced how wolfsbane and larkspur build diterpenoid alkaloids, then rebuilt the pathway inside tobacco plants.
A team at the University of Lancashire sequenced everything living or formerly living on samples taken in 1978. The result is a 600-year archive of everyone who ever handled the cloth, and no verdict on the question people actually ask.
A homeowner sealed the fragments in glass jars with gloves and foil. That one decision preserved amino acids, phosphates and evidence of liquid water on the parent asteroid.
The slow clicks top 200 decibels, come roughly once every 5 to 10 seconds, and are produced by an organ in the whale's head that can weigh more than five tonnes.
In densely populated coastal areas the water is gaining on the land at 6 millimeters a year — nearly double the rate driven by climate alone. In Jakarta, parts of the city are sinking 42 millimeters a year.
Airborne laser scanning flagged the candidate. Climbers had to hike two days uphill and drop a tape from the crown to prove it. The forest around it is one of the most carbon-dense on Earth.
Quantum simulations published in PNAS find hydrogen concentrated at about 16% at the inner core boundary, thinning to 9% at the center — and moving through the iron lattice while the iron itself stays solid.
Ice-rich lunar soil carries seismic waves two to three times faster than dry soil, a University of Maryland-led team reports. China's Chang'e-7 lands a seismometer near Shackleton Crater later this year, and it can test the idea.
Potsdam researchers stripped El Niño, volcanoes and the solar cycle out of the temperature record and found a break around 2015 that shows up in all five major global datasets.
Local winners keep their seats, national seat share matches national vote share, the legislature stays a fixed size. Once enough parties exist, you can have any two.
Sediment cores from Canada's Herschel Island show that bacteria largely ignore the old permafrost carbon in favor of fresher algal material — keeping most of it out of the atmosphere.
A team led by SUNY Poly and the Kavli IPMU finds that a primordial black hole passing through a white dwarf could tidally heat it into a thermonuclear runaway — and that the resulting explosions would leave a distinctive chemical signature already visible in the Milky Way.
Manchester researchers watched magma from La Palma's 2021 eruption crystallize inside an X-ray-transparent pressure vessel, and found extra heat dissolves the seeds new crystals need.
The polygonal fractures in Valle Grande measure two to three inches across and climb a 20-foot butte. Scientists have three competing explanations and no answer yet.
A new method called TRACE detected a "ghost" lineage that split from us 800,000 years ago and left about 1% of the modern genome, plus a second, far older population inherited through the Denisovans.
University of South Florida satellite data recorded 27 million metric tons of sargassum across the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf in July, following a record 40 million tons in 2025 that never fully dispersed. Quintana Roo businesses report sales down 30 percent.
Glass dredged from the Kermadec arc north of New Zealand carries several times more gold than mid-ocean ridge magma. The trick is that the mantle has to melt more than once.
A genomic study of Scalesia plants shows evolution reaching an identical solution again and again by completely different routes, complicating a long-held assumption about repeatability.
A University of Michigan tool called Skelevision scanned 15,000 museum specimens and located a spike in body-shape change 35 million years ago, as the planet plunged into cooling.
The spacecraft skimmed 2,864 miles above Mars on May 15 to steal speed for its trip to a metal asteroid. The flyby doubled as a full dress rehearsal — and produced a timelapse of the Red Planet.
Rutgers simulations found that water rising from Europa's ocean turns turbulent, dumps its heat and freezes its own escape route closed — before it can ever reach the shallow pockets spacecraft are designed to find.
Yale researchers identified Eosphorosuchus lacrimosa, a jackal-sized crocodile relative from 210 million years ago with a short snout and a skull built for crushing.
House sizes at Mohenjo-daro converged as the Indus Valley metropolis matured. The city spent its wealth on drains, street grids and standardized weights rather than palaces.