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Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
Potsdam researchers stripped El Niño, volcanoes and the solar cycle out of the temperature record and found a break around 2015 that shows up in all five major global datasets.
Local winners keep their seats, national seat share matches national vote share, the legislature stays a fixed size. Once enough parties exist, you can have any two.
Sediment cores from Canada's Herschel Island show that bacteria largely ignore the old permafrost carbon in favor of fresher algal material — keeping most of it out of the atmosphere.
A team led by SUNY Poly and the Kavli IPMU finds that a primordial black hole passing through a white dwarf could tidally heat it into a thermonuclear runaway — and that the resulting explosions would leave a distinctive chemical signature already visible in the Milky Way.
Manchester researchers watched magma from La Palma's 2021 eruption crystallize inside an X-ray-transparent pressure vessel, and found extra heat dissolves the seeds new crystals need.
The polygonal fractures in Valle Grande measure two to three inches across and climb a 20-foot butte. Scientists have three competing explanations and no answer yet.
A new method called TRACE detected a "ghost" lineage that split from us 800,000 years ago and left about 1% of the modern genome, plus a second, far older population inherited through the Denisovans.
University of South Florida satellite data recorded 27 million metric tons of sargassum across the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf in July, following a record 40 million tons in 2025 that never fully dispersed. Quintana Roo businesses report sales down 30 percent.
Glass dredged from the Kermadec arc north of New Zealand carries several times more gold than mid-ocean ridge magma. The trick is that the mantle has to melt more than once.
A genomic study of Scalesia plants shows evolution reaching an identical solution again and again by completely different routes, complicating a long-held assumption about repeatability.
A University of Michigan tool called Skelevision scanned 15,000 museum specimens and located a spike in body-shape change 35 million years ago, as the planet plunged into cooling.
The spacecraft skimmed 2,864 miles above Mars on May 15 to steal speed for its trip to a metal asteroid. The flyby doubled as a full dress rehearsal — and produced a timelapse of the Red Planet.
Rutgers simulations found that water rising from Europa's ocean turns turbulent, dumps its heat and freezes its own escape route closed — before it can ever reach the shallow pockets spacecraft are designed to find.
Yale researchers identified Eosphorosuchus lacrimosa, a jackal-sized crocodile relative from 210 million years ago with a short snout and a skull built for crushing.
House sizes at Mohenjo-daro converged as the Indus Valley metropolis matured. The city spent its wealth on drains, street grids and standardized weights rather than palaces.
Inside fallout debris from the 1945 atomic blast, researchers found a silicon-rich iron alloy with an atomic order never seen in any industrial material — condensed from vapor and frozen in the expanding fireball.
Individual readings from the rover's Mössbauer spectrometer were too noisy to show it. Combined into one composite spectrum, they revealed crystalline hematite sitting in ordinary Martian soil.
Scientists believed the black pigments were pure mineral oxides, making radiocarbon dating impossible. Two non-destructive techniques found charcoal running through the lines, and the samples came back with wildly different ages.
Kobe University researchers bounced seismic waves through the seafloor beneath Japan's Kikai caldera and found a magma reservoir sitting in exactly the chamber that emptied 7,300 years ago — supplied by a new source.
A study in Current Biology argues vertebrates lost their paired eyes, kept one eye on top of the head, then rebuilt stereo vision out of it — and that the leftover of that ancient eye is still inside your skull.
A UC Davis analysis of 26,400 trees across 19 groves found prescribed burns cut sequoia mortality by 77% in the Castle and KNP Complex fires — and could have saved 3,900 more trees.
Cold Spring Harbor researchers did not build a new antibiotic. They built a compound that disables the enzyme bacteria use to shrug the old one off — and the old one started killing again.
One method squeezes water through a constriction until imploding vapor bubbles hit thousands of degrees. The other floats PFAS to the surface on gas bubbles and burns them apart in plasma.
Kyoto University researchers say fossils from Oita prefecture belong to a new genus, only the sixth ever described in the giant salamander family, and suspect other museum specimens have been misfiled for years.
Researchers compared 142 people with exceptional memory against 89 typical peers and found no genetic advantage — not in APOE, not in polygenic risk scores, not even in rare protective variants.
In mice engineered to carry human GLP-1 receptors, oral drugs orforglipron and danuglipron switched on the central amygdala and cut dopamine release during pleasurable eating — a pathway researchers had not expected them to touch.
ETH Zurich simulations suggest the planet's vast canyons are far younger than assumed — evidence that Venus is tectonically alive rather than a dead world frozen in place.
Rapamycin quieted brain overactivity, reduced seizure risk and eased repetitive behavior in animals whose symptoms traced back to inflammation before birth — but the effect faded.
Artemis III has been rewritten as a dress rehearsal: three rockets launching in quick succession in 2027, two prototype landers, and a crew that stays in Earth orbit the whole time.
One whale holds the carcass. Another lets go at the last second and rams it at speed. Researchers say it is the first documented case of orcas using collision as a butchering technique.