A new study published in Nature provides the most detailed picture to date of Neanderthal diversity in Western Europe shortly before their extinction.

A cutting-edge analysis of the teeth from Homo naledi skeletons in a South African cave system found no males within the group. Experts are unsure what to make of the finding.

SpaceX chose to keep its latest prototype test launch of its Starfall capsule under tight wraps, suggesting the military is involved.

It's been two years since Starliner left a crew stranded in space, but NASA is not giving up on the spacecraft just yet.

Don't let garden pests move in—these six tips from pros will keep bugs and animals from burrowing in your yard this summer.

Get in a car. Point it at the sky. Drive at the speed limit. You would reach the official boundary of outer space — the line at which Earth’s atmosphere thins to the point where conventional aircraft can no longer generate enough lift to fly, and at which orb…

Hidde Jense helped capture the earliest light in the Universe in detail. We spoke to him about what this groundbreaking observation reveals

A careful look back at the 27 December 2004 giant flare from SGR 1806-20, what instruments recorded, and why the energy estimate depends on distance.

We are used to saying that Neanderthals went extinct, around forty thousand years ago, edged out by modern humans. Joshua Akey, a geneticist at Princeton, thinks that is the wrong word. His team’s reading of the DNA finds that Neanderthals and modern humans i…

National security concerns focus down to Earth. Cosmic discoveries focus on what lies far from Earth. Naively, they have nothing in common…

A new genus and species of four-winged pennaraptoran dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of northern China is adding another twist to the story of how birds evolved from their dinosaur ancestors.

Curtin University researchers have determined the most precise age yet for the oldest known impact crater on Earth, providing new insight into how meteorite strikes shaped the planet during its earliest history.

The discovery of all five nucleobases on Ryugu strengthens the idea that life’s molecular ingredients formed in space before reaching Earth.

The next-generation observatory arrived in Florida on June 21 to begin a roughly 70-day march to the pad. NASA is targeting liftoff no earlier than Aug. 30 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

The unassuming lugworm releases gravity-defying poop—something that represents a broader theme in the shape of all poop.

Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe CRISTAL-02 and discovered a galaxy-killing wind.

Many of Earth's mass extinctions await clear explanations. We know an impact wiped out the dinosaurs, but what about the planet's other extinction events? New research says flybys of planetary mass objects could've been responsible.

In June 1900, Nikola Tesla published an essay in The Century Magazine titled “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy.” Most of it was about electricity generation, solar power, and the technical ambitions he had accumulated over two decades of engineering wor…

Giant sperm, relatively speaking, find a way to move together in confined space, study shows

A few days ago, I came across a stat on social media that stopped my scrolling entirely. Bold text on a plain white background: “70% of Gen Z and Millennials can’t fully relax because they’ve been taught that resting is a waste of time.” I screenshotted it im…

Current amphibian development may not have been typical of early land vertebrates.

T. Coronae Borealis undergoes a dramatic nova explosion once every 80 years on average, causing it to shine as bright as Polaris, the North Star.

Now that the summer solstice has passed, the first full moon of summer is coming to light up the night sky.

"This activity is consistent with sub-satellite deployments conducted by the space plane in previous missions," private space surveillance company LeoLabs wrote after detecting the object.

Astronomers have uncovered the chemical profile of a very pink planet, potentially solving a decade-old mystery about its faint appearance.

Einstein’s special theory of relativity, published in 1905, made a number of strange predictions about how time and motion interact, several of which sounded so counterintuitive that for the next half-century even physicists who accepted the underlying mathem…

USC study: Diet, small amounts of amino acid methionine increased healthy lifespan.

NASA's plan to deorbit the International Space Station in coming years has stirred up a wave of reaction by a leading ocean conservation organization.

Jupiter-mass, squeezed into a lemon by the dead star it hugs, and wrapped in an atmosphere of almost pure carbon unlike any planet ever measured. The team that found it says it appears to break every known way of building a planet.

Float in a darkened module on the International Space Station, close your eyes, and wait. Before long, most astronauts report the same thing: an occasional flash, a spot or a short streak of light, against the dark behind their eyelids. No light is reaching t…

Vegetarians need not worry yet—plants will be on Earth for a long time to come. But not forever. The sun will ultimately determine the long-term existence of life on Earth. Its total energy output, called luminosity, has been increasing over epochs and eons b…

M82's intense star formation, thought to be the result of a galaxy merger, will be a short-lived event in astronomical terms, which makes this a one-of-a-kind environment to study. M82 is also known as the Cigar galaxy, Messier 82, NGC 3034.

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) scientists have used a classic optical phenomenon known as the Poisson spot to create stable patterns of light called optical skyrmions, which are tiny, swirling configurations in the properties of l…

When and where the next large earthquake will strike remains one of the most difficult questions in geoscience. Researchers from the GFZ Helmholtz Center for Geosciences led by Dr. Sadegh Karimpouli and Prof. Dr. Patricia Martínez-Garzón have now—together wit…

A study published in May in Nature Astronomy proposes a way to separate biological chemistry from non-biological chemistry that does not depend on finding any particular molecule. The signal is not which compounds are present. It is how evenly they are spread…

A biologist specializing in invasive species has partnered with a former Pentagon strategist in pushing NASA to construct a “lunar biocontainment facility.”

Salamanders can regrow lost limbs by organizing cells into a blastema, a temporary structure that enables tissue regrowth.

When tested with a classic psychological assessment, advanced AI models experienced a total breakdown in focus. A new PNAS Nexus study suggests these systems lack the human-like executive control necessary to override automatic responses and maintain complex …

"This discovery provides a crucial insight into how planets form even around massive, eccentric objects."

Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell has tracked every object in orbit since 1989 from a personal database — and as Starlink crossed 10,600 active satellites in June 2026, his private catalog became the number governments, reporters, and regulators cite.

Two cups of warm water don't make one cup of boiling water. But in the quantum world, multiple low-energy photons can combine to produce a single, higher-energy photon.

Astronomers have reported the discovery of an unusual X-ray transient detected by the Einstein Probe that does not fit any known class of cosmic explosions. The paper presenting its multiwavelength analysis was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the …

Three new editions of the Perpetual Moon 41.5 Steel bring coloured mother-of-pearl to one of Arnold & Son's emblematic watches.

A rare and spectacular total solar eclipse is set for Aug. 12, 2026, across the Arctic, eastern Greenland, western Iceland, the Atlantic Ocean, and northern Spain.

The last common ancestor of human beings and octopuses was a small, flatworm-like creature that lived in the ocean approximately 600 million years ago. Whatever this animal looked like, it almost certainly did not have a brain in any meaningful sense — its ne…

A cave in New Zealand has yielded fossils from a lost ecosystem that existed about 1 million years ago, including a possible flying ancestor of the kākāpō. The discovery reveals that volcanoes and climate upheaval were reshaping the country’s wildlife and dri…

On the night of 25 January 1849, Captain Kempthorne of the ship Moozuffer recorded in his log that the Arabian Sea around him had begun to glow. The phenomenon went on for hours. The ocean to every horizon had turned the colour of milk, or of liquid mercury. …

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has an ancient age, but not for the reason most commonly touted. These three lines of evidence are far stronger.

Mars' innermost moon, Phobos, has long puzzled planetary scientists, who have continually debated whether it's a captured asteroid or formed from debris after a giant impactor struck the Martian surface. The key to solving the mystery mainly rests with a bett…

Earth began without a Moon. The young planet, barely formed, had no companion in orbit, and how it came by one is a question that took most of a century, and a set of returned Moon rocks, to answer with any confidence. The leading explanation is a collision. …

The underground fungi network runs densest beneath wild grasslands, the very habitat that farming is erasing fastest of all.

In a rapidly changing climate landscape, the plants we rely on for food, textiles and more face a multitude of challenges, including rising temperatures, drought and disease. Caltech's Gözde Demirer, the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Chemical Engin…

Researchers at European XFEL, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Rostock University and other collaborating institutions have used high-precision experiments to demonstrate that the most widely used models for the behavior of electrons in warm dense…

Researchers say the discovery could be a “Rosetta stone” for cosmic signals.

When it comes to phenomena that may have changed the course of human history, fire has to be near the top of the list.

Research led by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, along with Professor Subir Sarkar from the University of Oxford, questions the widely accepted argument that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating and that this is driven by "dar…

For decades, paleoanthropologists assumed that hominins -- the lineage leading to modern humans -- gradually grew larger over millions of years.

As we scour and scorch the Earth for deeper wells of energy, investors and government agencies are pouring billions into nuclear fusion research. The hope is that fusion may ultimately provide a virtually limitless source of clean energy.

Voyager 1 is the fastest and most distant object people have ever built. It left Earth in 1977 and, almost half a century later, it is still moving at about 17 kilometres every second, far quicker than any rifle bullet. By that measure it holds a record nothi…