Section
Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
The vortices had never been resolved before. Researchers think they twist magnetic field lines tight enough to power nanoflares and move magnetic energy through the Sun's atmosphere faster than models allow.
A Seoul National University team found the active site on a solid oxide cell's silver nanocatalyst moves when the device flips from making electricity to making hydrogen.
Pentavalent uranium was supposed to be fleeting. German researchers found bacteria producing it in bulk, bound into a compound so stable it gained ground when exposed to oxygen.
The brain is long gone, but it left impressions on the inside of the skull. Researchers reconstructed those spaces digitally — and found nothing to support the idea that the dodo was stupid.
Instead of handing an electron to whichever molecule wants it most, a University of Wisconsin–Madison team ejects it into the solvent — where it will attach to almost anything.
NWA 13441 dates to 1.273 billion years, an age no other Martian meteorite occupies. Its chemistry says it came from a piece of Mars that has sat untouched since the solar system formed.
Divers off Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, found a 70-foot merchant vessel with its cargo of hundreds of amphorae still stacked where it sank. Italy's culture minister called it one of the most important underwater finds in years.
Chinese researchers wrapped a light-absorbing core in a shell that shuttles protons the way a cell membrane does, hitting 1.2% solar-to-chemical efficiency — and it keeps working when embedded in a hydrogel and left outside.
Nagoya University researchers found that complement C3 produced by cells within a tumor blocks immune-suppressing cells from getting in. Lung cancer patients with high local C3 responded to treatment about half the time. Those with low levels: none did.
Rediscovered vertebrae from a single 11-million-year-old shark in Denmark support a length beyond 79 feet — and suggest its pups were born 12 feet long.
Researchers separated the microbes that lived in the mummy's body from those that arrived later and found cold-loving organisms related to Antarctic strains, some apparently feeding on the chemical used to clean him.
Washington University engineers cracked a trade-off that has blocked fuel-cell catalysts for years, and they are aiming it at the data centers now on track to eat 9% of U.S. electricity.
The instrument resolves 3-micron detail across 5 square centimeters at 120 frames per second — a combination of resolution, field of view and speed that optical engineers have treated as a fixed trade-off for decades.
The 8,800-pound Falcon 9 second stage that launched two lunar landers in January 2025 finally came down Wednesday, near the far-side craters Einstein and Bell.
Stanford and Arc Institute researchers used the Evo genome language models to design bacteriophages no evolution ever produced — the first peer-reviewed case of generative AI building a functioning viral genome.
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.