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Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
Tree rings date the clinker-built vessel to the 1620s or 1630s. Archaeologists recovered more than 60 objects in 12 days, including a clay brick no one can explain.
Using Pliny the Younger's eyewitness account of Vesuvius as a benchmark, Berkeley researchers sharpened argon-argon dating to 0.4% accuracy and halved the uncertainty on potassium-40's half-life.
Lead isotopes trace a hoard found by a farmer in 1967 to the Kipushi deposit, pointing to a centuries-old trade route that likely ran by canoe down the Kafue and Zambezi rivers.
Cornell and Beijing researchers found that BC200, a gene active in human neurons, is still a working 'jumping gene' that has leapt into the molluscum contagiosum poxvirus at least twice.
Two burials at the 11,000-year-old Turkish site show the same damage as loose bone fragments found in its monumental buildings, suggesting erosion carried them downhill rather than ritual alone.
Local experts described elephants walking straight to specific trees when sick and mothers feeding plants to calves. Of 39 resources named, 87% are also used in local human medicine.
A 3D simulation of asteroid bombardment finds the planet stopped being sterilized around 4.4 billion years ago, and that impact-heated hot springs peaked just as the crust calmed down.
The 2,000-year-old complex at the foot of Jerusalem's Temple Mount includes a bath still standing to its full 14-foot height under its original stone vault. Coins show it died with the city in 70 CE.
A Munich team built a fully bio-based adhesive from the sugary goo mistletoe seeds use to cling to trees. It rivals structural glues, survives -150°C and can be unstuck and restuck, which could make electronics easier to repair.
HD 3167 b circles its star once a day, 154 light-years away, and is cooler on its day side than bare rock should be. That points to an atmosphere, and maybe a glimpse of what the newborn Earth looked like.
Kayrasaurus changliensis stretched more than 11 feet and packed over 77 tiny teeth into its jaws, making it the largest therizinosaur yet found in the Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota.
University of Alberta physicists report in Nature that the solid inner core tugs on lumps in the mantle, a 'gravitational torque' that explains decades-long swings in the length of a day.
The visitor's water holds roughly 30 to 60 times more deuterium than solar system comets. A RIKEN-led team says a star-forming cloud poor in heavy elements explains that and its odd carbon.
Hungarian scientists put EEG caps on 20 dogs and 20 people. Both locked on to words built from consonants, a bias never found even in monkeys, and even dogs raised on the street showed it.
The panel voted 7-2 that the benefits of Grail's Galleri test outweigh its risks, but only 6-4 that it works. A top National Cancer Institute scientist warned that a broad rollout would "risk harm and waste resources."
ETH Zurich isotope measurements on half a gram of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample overturn the idea that Bennu formed late and far out, and suggest it holds the original recipe for rocky planets.
Forebrain and midbrain come from cells expressing Otx2; the hindbrain, which runs breathing and heartbeat, from cells expressing Gbx2. The finding, in Nature Neuroscience, explains why no one could grow human hindbrain neurons in a dish, and now they can, opening a path for ALS and spinal muscular atrophy research.
Nearly 20 of the Qumran scrolls deal with calendars and astronomy. Prof. Eshbal Ratzon argues the calendar was live in the sect's second-century BCE founding fight with Jerusalem, became unworkable as the seasons slid, and was set aside as relations warmed under Alexander Jannaeus, without ever losing its place in the community's identity.
The University of Arizona-led team says the world's largest rodent, a wetland animal that lives nowhere in Chile today, must have walked around the top of South America along a coastal corridor rather than over the 18,000-foot Andes, and that the coast was once 'sunny Southern California full of palm trees.'
Six GNSS stations installed in 2016 track the ground to within a millimeter, and two seismometers listen for the kind of magnitude-5.9 quake that preceded the last explosive eruption. The mountain blows up roughly every 10 to 15 years, and the researchers expect one 'within our lifetime.'
TOI-1355 b gave itself away when its secondary eclipse arrived early, a sign the orbit is not circular. The University of Tokyo team says the planet was probably flung inward by other giants and is now being slowly reeled into a circle by its star's tides. They are already writing a JWST proposal.
The JCI Insight study maps 'loss of Y' from healthy tissue through precancerous cells to full malignancy for the first time and finds it strongest around colon, rectal, esophageal, pancreatic and lung cancers. Its senior author says it may be 'one of the earliest signposts of cancer forming.'
The tilcayo weighs about three pounds, lives in Bolivia's Yungas cloud forest and has never been found anywhere else. The Current Biology study that names it also carves the tiger cats of South America into five distinct species, all of them, one author says, 'in habitats that are vanishing fast.'
Two independent tracers in outer-solar-system iron meteorites both point to matrix levels of 8% to 17%, lower than in any known chondrite. 'Both tracers independently tell the same story,' said lead author Damanveer Grewal. The result pushes the aerodynamic sorting that built the planets back to the very beginning.
A Chengdu-led team combed 17 years of data from stations in China and South Korea and found the mountain's own weight is slowly squeezing the shattered rock into faults. The tremors could make it harder to tell old bomb damage from a new test.
The August 31 burn was more than 99 percent accurate. Goddard's center director credited 'exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX.' A second burn later this month is expected to add four more years.
The sensor uses nitrogen-vacancy defects in diamond, needs no cryogenic cooling and no magnetic bias field, and was built as a fiber endoscope. It is still less sensitive than SQUIDs, but a flux concentrator could boost the signal more than 100-fold.
PANXEON reads three signals at once, two kinds of microRNA and the CA19-9 protein, and lets an AI combine them into one risk score. Only 14% of pancreatic cancer patients survive five years, mostly because 90% are found too late.
'At first sight, I thought it was just two whales resting on the surface.' The study, published Wednesday in Discover Animals, says she never tried to lift the calf, suggesting she knew it was dead soon after birth.
An Intuitive Machines image specialist spotted the fresh scar on Oct. 24, 2025, and 'dropped everything.' The blast churned the surface over 66 miles and left a 4-mile cold spot. The IAU has named it McGetchin.