Science
A Rocky Super-Earth 25 Light-Years Away Just Got a Lot More Interesting
New measurements slashed Gliese 3378b's estimated mass, tipping it from a likely gas world into a rocky planet sitting squarely in its star's habitable zone.
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Science Page 10
Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
Science20,000-Year-Old Bees Turned a Dead Beast's Teeth Into Their Nursery
On the island of Hispaniola, scientists found the first known evidence of ancient bees nesting inside the empty tooth sockets of mammal jawbones scattered across a cave floor by owls.
ScienceHumans and Great Apes Have Been Laughing to the Same Beat for 15 Million Years
A study of chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and people found that all of them giggle with the same underlying rhythm, hinting at the deep roots of human speech.
ScienceWhy Aging Muscles Heal Slowly: Scientists Find the Molecular 'Brake' — and a Hidden Trade-Off
A UCLA team discovered that a protein called NDRG1 builds up in old muscle stem cells and slams the brakes on repair. Switching it off makes aged cells act young again — but at a cost to their long-term survival.
ScienceScientists Uncover a New Way Brain Cells Die — and It May Be Central to Alzheimer's
Researchers at King's College London have identified 'karyoptosis,' a form of cell death in which a neuron's nucleus shrinks and shatters under the strain of toxic proteins — a process far more common in diseased brains than healthy ones.
ScienceA Surprise in the Brain's Movement Center Could Upend How We Study Tremor and Dystonia
Two types of cerebellar cells long assumed to move in lockstep often don't, a Virginia Tech study finds — suggesting scientists have been watching the wrong signals in disorders like ataxia and dystonia.
ScienceA Spray-On Powder That Stops Deadly Bleeding in One Second
Scientists in South Korea have created a naturally derived powder that turns to a sealing gel the instant it touches blood, a battlefield-born invention that could transform emergency care in ambulances, disasters and operating rooms.
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ScienceA Fossil That Sat in a Drawer for 40 Years Is Antarctica's First Dinosaur Bone
An 82-million-year-old tail vertebra collected on James Ross Island in 1985 has been identified as a titanosaur — the first dinosaur bone ever found on the continent.
ScienceTo Build a Brain, Neurons Snap Their Own DNA — Then Race to Repair It
Kyoto University researchers report in Nature that migrating neurons suffer double-strand DNA breaks as they squeeze through developing tissue, a hidden hazard of brain construction.
ScienceHow One Cell Builds a Brain of 170 Billion: Cells Use Their Family Tree as a Map
In the journal Neuron, Cold Spring Harbor scientists propose that brain cells find their place by tracking their own lineage — a positioning system that could also inform AI design.
ScienceThe Century-Old Puzzle of Water in Tiny Spaces Is Solved — and It's About Pressure, Not Magic
Cambridge physicists used quantum-accurate simulations to show that water squeezed into nanoscale gaps isn't inherently more reactive; crushing internal pressures explain the effect that has baffled labs for a decade.
ScienceWebb Peers Through the Dust of the 'Cigar Galaxy' and Counts 16.5 Million Stars
In 65 hours of infrared observations, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope resolved the frenetic starburst galaxy Messier 82 in unprecedented detail, exposing a warped disk and millions of individual suns.
ScienceAstronomers Find a Third Galaxy With No Dark Matter, Strung Along a Mysterious Cosmic Trail
The faint galaxy DF9 joins two earlier oddballs in a straight line of objects that appear to lack the invisible mass thought to bind galaxies together — hinting at a violent birth.
ScienceHubble Marks America's 250th With a 'Stellar Sparkler' — One of the Milky Way's Oldest Star Clusters
NASA released a red, white and blue portrait of the 13-billion-year-old globular cluster NGC 6426, whose ancient stars hold clues to how the universe first forged the ingredients for planets and life.
ScienceWebb Spots the Earliest Supernova Ever Seen — a Star That Blew Up When the Universe Was 730 Million Years Old
Following a gamma-ray burst to its source, the James Webb Space Telescope caught a collapsing massive star from the cosmic dawn and, for the first time at such a distance, imaged its faint host galaxy.
ScienceJames Webb's Mysterious 'Little Red Dots' May Be Newborn Supermassive Black Holes, New Spectrum Suggests
The most detailed spectrum yet of one of these ancient objects strongly favors a black hole cloaked in hot gas over a galaxy full of stars — evidence, researchers say, of heavy black-hole seeds being born in real time.
ScienceJames Webb Cracks the 13-Year Mystery of the 'Pink Planet,' Finding Salty Clouds 57 Light-Years Away
After a decade hidden in its star's glare, the giant world GJ 504 b gave up its secrets to Webb in just two hours — revealing water, methane, ammonia and, for the first time, clouds made of salt.
ScienceWorld First: A Patient Is Dosed With a Cell-Rejuvenation Therapy Meant to Reverse Vision Loss
Life Biosciences began the first human trial of partial epigenetic reprogramming — a gene therapy built on David Sinclair's research that aims to make aging eye cells young again.
- Science
AI Could Speed the Hunt for New Physics Tenfold — but Scientists Found a Catch
Transfer learning slashes the cost of cosmological simulations, yet a Princeton team warns the same shortcut can trick AI into missing real discoveries.
ScienceDecades-Old Puzzle Solved: Why Water Trapped at the Nanoscale Behaves So Strangely
Cambridge-led researchers find that confined water isn't inherently more reactive — crushing internal pressure and the chemistry of the surrounding surface explain the long-mysterious effect.
ScienceA Quantum Device Makes Sound the Textbooks Say Shouldn't Exist
McGill physicists forced electrons through an atom-thin crystal near absolute zero and got precise bursts of quantum 'sound' — in a regime existing theory says should stay silent.
ScienceAstronomers Find Two Giant Planets 'Lighter Than Cotton Candy'
The rare 'super-puff' worlds TOI-791 b and c are roughly Jupiter's size but a tiny fraction of its mass, ranking among the lowest-density planets ever detected.
ScienceScientists Crack How Melanoma Cells Become 'Immortal'
University of Pittsburgh researchers identified a long-hidden genetic partner, TPP1, that teams up with a known mutation to give the deadly skin cancer its runaway lifespan.
ScienceA Sea Anemone Just Flipped the Rulebook on How Animals Fight Viruses
Researchers found the anemone uses a protein that suppresses — rather than switches on — its immune response, yet still defeats viruses, upending assumptions about how immunity evolved.
ScienceAstronomers Crack a Decade-Old Cosmic Mystery: Two Dead Stars Behind a Repeating Radio Signal
A strange radio pulse arriving every two hours has been traced to a white dwarf and a red dwarf locked in a tight orbit, their colliding magnetic fields firing the beat across space.
ScienceEarth May Have Been Seeding Venus's Clouds With Living Microbes for a Billion Years
A new modeling study finds that asteroid impacts could blast Earth microbes into space, potentially delivering about 100 viable cells a year — up to 20 billion over a billion years — into the Venusian atmosphere.
ScienceNASA Satellite Captures the First Detailed Look at a Giant Tsunami — and Overturns a Key Assumption
The U.S.-French SWOT satellite mapped the Pacific tsunami unleashed by a magnitude 8.8 Kamchatka earthquake, revealing waves far more scattered and complex than the textbook picture of a single, stable surge.
ScienceRepurposed Drug Frees Trapped Immune Cells to Attack a Rare Liver Cancer
University of Washington scientists found that fibrolamellar carcinoma hides from immunotherapy by sequestering T cells in fibrous tissue — and that the FDA-approved drug AMD3100 lets them back in to kill the tumor.
ScienceNew Solid Material Turns Ordinary Sunlight Into Higher-Energy Ultraviolet Light
After a 14-year effort, chemists in Japan built a stable solid that upconverts visible light into UV, opening the door to sunlight-powered air purification, 3D printing and photocatalysis.
ScienceNASA's Lucy Finds a Wobbling, Peanut-Shaped Asteroid Carrying Signs of Ancient Water
Close-up data from the Donaldjohanson flyby reveal a 155-million-year-old relic that tumbles like a spinning top and bears chemical traces of water.
