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Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
An ESA-led team stitched together 45 surveys from 27 satellites to push the record back to the 1970s. The ice sheets were stable through the 1990s, then 'it really kicked in during the 2010s.' A brief pause from 2020 to 2023 is over.
It's the first actual number for a tyrannosaur's body heat. The isotope 'thermometer' needed 90% less enamel than a decade ago, which is what finally persuaded the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to let them drill Thomas the T. rex.
Elias 2-24 b beat the previous record for the youngest known planet by more than 4 million years. It was found in decade-old Keck archive images, in exactly the gap in the star's disk that ALMA spotted a decade ago.
The 1,800-year-old papyri were carbonized under 20 meters of ash from Vesuvius in 79 CE, and carbon ink on carbon paper is nearly invisible to X-rays. The new PLOS One study proposes screening the library for lead first, then virtually unrolling only the scrolls that have it.
Microscopy and 3D models of 18 figurines from the Mizyn campsite show the Schreger and Owen lines inside ivory were copied onto the surface, an eastern tradition that predates Western Europe's.
The INAF-led VST survey reached depths the Rubin Observatory won't hit for years. The satellites around NGC 5084 appear to line up in a plane, the same puzzling arrangement seen around the Milky Way.
GPS collars from the Zambian Carnivore Programme and Montana State tracked young Lycaon pictus leaving their packs to find mates. The three males made it to a new home in the Luangwa Valley; the females never found a pack.
Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, a 240-million-year-old tusked herbivore, ties Tanzania's fossil beds to Brazil and Argentina. The rocks that were supposed to hold the earliest dinosaurs can no longer claim the title.
BioPykrete revives a World War II idea at the molecular level: a protein with one end that grips ice and another that grips cellulose stops cracks from racing through the material. The team says it could one day be a building material for the Arctic and Antarctic.
The IC 348 panorama shows newborn stars firing jets into the surrounding gas, two protostars with nearly parallel outflows, and a planet-mass object that appears to have its own disk. The lightest brown dwarfs also carry an unidentified hydrocarbon in their atmospheres.
The first continent-wide map of grounded icebergs, built from Sentinel-1 radar images by a University of Tasmania master's student, finds 80% of them crowded onto 14% of the coastline. The small ones are the ones most likely to melt loose first.
Landauer's principle says computing gets cheaper the colder it runs. Michael Garrett argues a computation-dominated civilization would dump its waste heat at 5 to 30 kelvin, in the far infrared and submillimeter, where no SETI survey has ever looked.
The Moon has no air, no water and no plate tectonics, so a micron-sized grain of alien ceramic or graphene could survive there for a billion years. A trillion grains per cubic meter means the search would have to be run by AI.
NGC 1068 is 45 million light-years away and one of the best-studied active galaxies in the sky. The hidden component moves 300 km/s faster than the visible one, tops 2,000 km/s and is escaping the galaxy for good.
Fourteen tail vertebrae and a set of chevron bones from a single animal, excavated at La Tejería in Teruel, place the giant as a close relative of Diplodocus hallorum. The find, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, redraws the Late Jurassic map.
Scanning electron microscopy and X-ray tomography of ash and lapilli from Etna, Stromboli and La Palma's Cumbre Vieja found sutures, welded clasts and re-broken crystals that record repeated fragmentation. The size of what comes out, which sets how far ash travels and how long airports close, depends on the healing as much as the breaking.
The JADES overdensity, four times denser than its surroundings, holds nearly half of all star formation in its patch of sky. Lyman-alpha light that should be swallowed by neutral hydrogen leaks out strongest at its core, the signature of an ionized cavity about 6 megaparsecs across.
A new three-way diagnostic separates starlight, black-hole radiation and shocks pixel by pixel. It suggests active black holes can trigger star formation as well as choke it.
Two known mechanisms did the damage, but only if the first one fired at the exact moment the solar wind crushed the magnetosphere. Standard forecasting models miss that timing entirely.
VT J1906+0849 is the brightest transient in the entire VLA Sky Survey. Its brightness temperature is up to 10 billion kelvin, gas near it moves at thousands of kilometers per second, and it flared again in late 2025. Nothing in the catalog of known galactic sources fits.
A new feasibility study in Frontiers in Space Technologies finds power is easy at the lunar poles and water is the wall. A village of 1,000 could last for centuries; the 'self-growing cities' pitched by Musk and Bezos could not.
David Kipping's search of LP 890-9c is by far the most sensitive exomoon hunt ever done. It rules out anything the size of Europa, Rhea or Umbriel, and it shows JWST has no noise floor stopping it from finding moons that small.
X-rays flared on schedule during AT 2016blu's March 2026 outburst and were absent in Chandra data from 2001–02. The star is the first known luminous blue variable with a compact companion.
A DLR team mapped surface roughness across the whole planet and found the roughest regions show the fewest contraction scarps. Correcting for what impacts buried brings Mercury's cooling history back in line with physics.
The first stellar occultation ever planned and observed with JWST shows Chariklo's inner ring getting denser while its outer ring thins out. Rings around small bodies were supposed to be stable.
JAXA says the July 5 flyby of asteroid Torifune produced the first successful laser-ranging measurement of an asteroid, a technique that sharpens the orbit predictions planetary defense depends on.
Max Planck and University of Colorado researchers tied the energy of the 300 strongest flares of 2010–2016 to the size of the active regions that produced them, then applied the relationship to 400 years of sunspot records. The biggest spot ever logged could, statistically, have fired a burst beyond anything ever measured on our star.
Massive stars elsewhere in the galaxy come in pairs about 69% of the time. In the S cluster around Sagittarius A*, only 43% do. Tracking 100,000 simulated binaries shows tidal forces destroy or merge roughly the right number, which points to the stars forming where they are.
A Paris-Saclay team used Mars Express and MRO spectrometers to rule out liquid water and CO2 geysers at Sisyphi Cavi. The timing points to slabs of carbon dioxide frost sliding downhill on a cushion of sublimating gas, like an air-hockey puck.
Kyoto University researchers say the asteroid's parent body concentrated nitrogen as its briny water froze or evaporated, acting as a slow chemical reactor.