Science
Japan's Hayabusa2 Buzzes a 'Two-Headed' Asteroid 62 Million Miles From Earth
The veteran probe swept within six miles of Torifune, snapping close-ups of a snowman-shaped space rock on the first stop of its extended mission.
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Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
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The 'Hobbit' Human May Have Scavenged Komodo Dragons' Leftovers to Survive
A new analysis of bones from an Indonesian cave suggests Homo floresiensis neither hunted big game nor controlled fire, deepening the mystery of its origins.
ScienceCreatine, the Gym Supplement, May Supercharge the Immune Cells That Fight Cancer, Study Finds
UCLA researchers report that the popular muscle-building compound energizes dendritic cells — the immune system's scouts — potentially making cancer immunotherapy work for far more patients.
ScienceAncient DNA From a 5,000-Year-Old French Tomb Reveals a Vanished People Replaced by Strangers
Genetic analysis of 132 skeletons in a megalithic tomb near Paris shows the community that built it collapsed — and centuries later, unrelated newcomers from the south were burying their dead in the same graves.
ScienceAstronomers Find One of the Faintest Galaxies Ever, an Ancient Speck Orbiting Andromeda With Just 46 Stars
So dim it nearly escaped detection, the newly confirmed dwarf galaxy And 35 is about 12.5 billion years old and offers a rare window into the universe's first generations of stars — and the nature of dark matter.
ScienceWebb Spots a Fully Formed Spiral 'Twin' of the Milky Way When the Universe Was Just a Toddler
The galaxy M1149-BSG-z5 already had a central bar of stars less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang — a structure astronomers assumed couldn't exist so early, and one that rewrites the timeline for how galaxies grow up.
ScienceScientists Resurrect a 3.2-Billion-Year-Old Enzyme That Made Life on Earth Possible
By rebuilding an ancient version of nitrogenase, researchers reopened a window on how microbes fed themselves before oxygen — and handed astrobiologists a chemical fingerprint to hunt for life beyond Earth.
ScienceScientists Urge NASA to Quarantine Alien Samples on the Moon Before They Reach Earth
A new proposal argues that rock and soil returned from Mars and beyond should be screened at a robotic facility on the Moon first — casting the lunar surface as humanity's first line of biological defense.
ScienceTextbooks Were Wrong: Human Hair Grows by Being Pulled Upward, Not Pushed From the Root
Using 3D live imaging of follicles kept alive in the lab, researchers found that coordinated cell movements act like a tiny motor, tugging the hair shaft upward — a discovery that could reshape baldness treatments.
ScienceScientists Find the Molecular 'Identity Switch' That Lets Colon Cancer Turn Deadly and Spread
When levels of a gene-regulating factor called GATA6 fall, colorectal cancer cells revert to a primitive, fetal-like state that can invade the bloodstream and seed tumors in the liver, a Weill Cornell and MIT study finds.
ScienceNASA Marks Four Years of Webb With a Never-Before-Seen Infrared Portrait of a Galactic Collision
To celebrate the James Webb Space Telescope's fourth science anniversary, NASA unveiled a new view of Centaurus A, peering through the dust that had long hidden the galaxy's violent heart.
ScienceA Cheap, Overlooked Blood Test May Beat Standard Cholesterol Screening at Preventing Heart Attacks
A new study finds that measuring apoB — a protein tag on every harmful cholesterol particle — guides treatment better than the standard LDL test, and does it cost-effectively.
ScienceStreetlights Are Trapping Thousands of Pill Bugs in Eerie 'Death Spirals'
In Israel, scientists documented swirling rings of more than 5,000 woodlice circling endlessly under artificial light — a collective behavior never before seen in the species.
ScienceScientists Map the Brain Circuit Where Deep Sleep Triggers the Body's Repair Hormone
A UC Berkeley team traced how non-REM sleep unleashes growth hormone — and found the hormone loops back to nudge the brain awake, a self-balancing system tied to muscle, fat and memory.
ScienceScientists Build a Cell From Scratch That Eats, Grows, Divides — and Evolves
The University of Minnesota's 'SpudCell,' assembled entirely from non-living chemical parts, completes a full life cycle — a milestone biologists have chased for decades.
ScienceA 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.
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.
