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Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
Scientists report that Porphyromonas gingivalis, a bacterium behind gum disease, can lodge in the aortic valve and drive the calcium buildup that causes a common and deadly heart condition.
Oaks continue absorbing carbon dioxide for months after their wood stops adding rings — a finding that could reshape how climate models treat forests.
Signals tied to decision-making showed up in a region long dismissed as a simple sensory relay, suggesting the brain weighs choices from the very first moments a signal arrives — and hinting at a blueprint for more efficient artificial intelligence.
Methane from spacecraft engines can 'hop' across the lunar surface and pile up in the very frozen craters scientists hope will preserve pristine clues to life's origins, researchers say.
In preclinical experiments, the widely used medication telmisartan sharply boosted the tumor-killing power of the targeted drug olaparib and rallied the immune system to join the attack.
Two fast-breeding mantis species from Asia have been formally declared invasive as they push northward across the continent, preying on pollinators, small vertebrates and even native mantises.
A massive, chemically mature spiral with a 14,700-light-year central bar existed just over a billion years after the Big Bang — a structure astronomers thought could not form so early.
In rats, a fiber-rich diet kept a beneficial tapeworm healthy and anti-inflammatory; strip the fiber away and the worm slipped into a hibernation-like state, wiping out its benefits.
Using lab-grown human retinas, Johns Hopkins scientists found the fovea gains its high-resolution color vision not by shuffling cells around but by converting them — a finding that rewrites a textbook belief.
Georgetown researchers used fMRI and EEG to show that intense practice pushes a learned task out of the bottlenecked prefrontal cortex, freeing the brain to genuinely do two things at once.
A rare goose unearthed from an ancient lakebed in Central Otago suggests the country's colossal 18-kilogram geese descended from far more recent arrivals than scientists long assumed.
A study in mice finds that tau — infamous for the tangles it forms in dementia — is essential during a brief window for turning fresh experiences into durable memories, reframing how scientists think about the protein.
Indian researchers found 32 color patterns in a single new species, Theridion himalayana, whose grinning markings evolved entirely separately from its celebrated Pacific look-alike.
Amsterdam UMC scientists scanned women across pregnancies and found a second one reshapes attention and movement networks, and that bigger changes tracked with fewer depression symptoms.
A Science Advances study found up to a third of an oak's yearly carbon capture happens after its wood is done growing, decoupling two processes scientists long assumed moved together.
A Loma Linda University team traced the 'baby snakes can't control their venom' scare back to 1960s news reports — and showed that adult rattlesnakes actually deliver far more venom and cause worse bites.
In animal models, a glycine-based tripeptide called DT-109 healed the intestinal barrier and rolled back MASH — a dangerous form of fatty liver disease that affects roughly 7% of people worldwide.
Georgia Tech researchers found that low doses of sulfoxaflor — a next-generation insecticide sprayed on corn and soybeans — hit bumblebees' ovaries hardest, raising fresh alarms about the fate of a key pollinator.
A study of a decade of U.S. poison-center data found calls involving GLP-1 drugs jumped from roughly 1,500 a year to more than 8,000 after semaglutide's weight-loss approval — most of them preventable dosing errors.
WashU scientists expected their mRNA vaccine to flop in mice missing the dendritic cells thought to be essential. Instead a related cell stepped in — overturning a core assumption and pointing toward sturdier shots.
Japanese researchers screening microbes from tree frogs, newts and lizards found one strain that erased colorectal tumors entirely — outperforming standard chemotherapy and immunotherapy in the lab.
A Max Planck team says soft lithium 'dendrites' pierce hard ceramic electrolytes like a waterjet cutting through rock. Solving the puzzle could unlock safer, longer-lasting solid-state batteries for phones and EVs.
Cameras captured the pink, blade-snouted 'living fossil' in its natural habitat off Jarvis Island and in the Tonga Trench — the deepest sighting ever of any white shark, extending its known range by 700 meters.
A Warwick–Monash team decoded how bacterial enzymes snap together to churn out variants of drugs like the approved lymphoma treatment romidepsin — a blueprint for engineering better ones.
By redesigning a single piece of hardware with engineered 'metamaterials,' researchers sharpened scans of hard-to-image tissue — without replacing the scanner.
Engineered nanoparticles triggered cancer cells to self-destruct while flipping 'cold' tumors 'hot,' producing complete remissions in mice when paired with immunotherapy.
Refined simulations from a NASA science center suggest the Sun's own magnetic dynamo is what keeps the mysterious tachocline confined to a knife-edge, a key to forecasting solar storms.
Using electric currents and water-based enzymes, a semiconductor chip synthesized 64 DNA sequences in parallel — a cleaner alternative to conventional DNA manufacturing.
Data from the DESI survey point to a lopsided cosmos, with galaxy patterns stretching across billions of light-years that clash with a bedrock assumption behind modern cosmology.
The European space telescope found 31 ancient quasars — two of them shining from when the universe was just 5% of its current age.