Section
Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
UC San Diego used cryo-electron microscopy to watch E. coli RNA polymerase transcribe hachimoji DNA, treating the four synthetic letters the same way it treats the natural ones.
Manganese piles up in a galaxy over time, so the amount of it says how old the place is. The hard part was knowing what its light should look like.
Ninety chicks survived to independence this season, matching what the recovery programme managed in its first 16 years combined. The total now stands at 325 birds.
The ceremony moved to Zurich on Wednesday, and the organizer said plainly why: it had become unsafe for some of the winners to travel to the United States. Honors went to the evolution of kissing and to a thousand pairs of buried underwear.
A University of Iowa team modeled how fast the insects can recolonize replanted forest and found it would take centuries. A test release of 20,000 cicadas was eaten within a week.
Cleveland Clinic's first-in-human trial of the CRISPR therapy CTX310 dosed 15 patients and followed them for a year. The team reported no serious side effects tied to the treatment.
Ancient genomes from Miracinonyx trumani make it a sister species to the puma, extend its known range 20 degrees farther north, and show broken circadian genes.
Lab experiments at up to 2,170C show carbon behaves backwards on Mercury: it stays out of the core and rises to the surface. That also rewrites what the core is made of.
Two studies find that radial glia — the cells that construct most of the human cortex — take their instructions from how they burn sugar and from thalamic fibers physically touching them.
The ice island calved off Petermann Glacier on August 4, the largest Arctic calving since 2020. Landsat 9 caught it colliding with Joe Island on consecutive days and coming out intact.
A team led by UNSW Sydney pulled a new Asgard archaeon out of Shark Bay stromatolites and imaged it physically joined to a bacterial partner, trading vitamins and hydrogen.
Blocking EP2 on tissue-resident macrophages kept old mice lean, strong and able to run a maze. A drug version worked on animals already 22 months old.
Tulane researchers found that vesper bats have two separate sets of immunoglobulin heavy-chain genes, an arrangement never before documented in a mammal. It may be part of why bats host viruses that would kill us without getting sick themselves.
Star formation is running at less than half the rate it did 4.5 billion years ago. A survey of 2.5 million galaxies says the raw gas supply has barely dropped, which breaks the standard explanation.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26 a.m. on August 30. Its 300-megapixel infrared camera surveys the sky about 1,000 times faster than Hubble.
The planet's north pole has worn a hexagon for four decades. The new southern decagon is still strengthening — and two amateur astronomers saw the first hints of it.
Sodium gas appeared and vanished over successive nights around PDS 70, a young sunlike star 370 light-years away. The likely explanation is icy bodies falling inward past two newborn gas giants.
Göttingen physicists imaged a molecular orbital with resolution finer than the gap between its own carbon atoms, using a tabletop X-ray source instead of a synchrotron.
A German team calibrated infrared measurements with hand-made glass beads and got 37% SiO₂, not the 62% in earlier estimates. BepiColombo arrives in orbit in November to check.
PNNL and SLAC combined ultrafast X-ray spectroscopy and scattering to see the solvent rearrange as a molecule picked up a proton — the coupling at the heart of proton-coupled electron transfer.
Two laser pulses — one to scramble the electrons, one to read them out — settled a long-running argument about how a second charge pattern forms in erbium tritelluride.
The proposed rule also lets some workers take 10 rem in a year instead of 5. The public comment period closes Aug. 31, and it could take effect early next year.
The problem with bonding anything submerged is the thin film of water coating every surface. A Chinese team solved it by making an adhesive that pushes the water out of its own way.
Of more than 10,000 fragments from a Carpathian cave, 83 carried unmistakable wear from use. Earlier excavators had thrown away exactly the pieces that would have shown it.
Researchers assembled 2,110 complete centromeres from 28 populations and found 1,870 variants nobody had catalogued. Some chromosomes are changing 20 times faster than others.
A UCLA and University at Buffalo team traced selection on the AMY1 gene back roughly 10,000 years, to the moment Andean highlanders started growing potatoes — and measured the advantage at 1.24 percent per generation.
A WB-57 jet at 50,000 feet will run down the Moon's shadow with four cameras shooting 20 frames a second, while roughly 86 balloons go up over Iceland and Spain.
A new paper traces the limit not to chaos but to something stranger: the unknowable phase of the photons streaming in from the sun.
Arctobatrachus urdensis had a boomerang-shaped skull 27 inches wide and 8 inches long. It is the largest plagiosaurid ever found, and one of the oldest.
Gypsum shaped like cabbage leaves and Christmas trees does not form from frost or vapor. It needs pooled brine — on a planet most models say froze solid three billion years ago.