Latest science news, discoveries and scientific developments.
The origins of the earliest life on Earth, prior to the rise of oxygen and photosynthesis, remain a mystery. Graveyards in brine pools at the bottom of the Red Sea may hold some answers.
Exoplanets are exotic worlds orbiting distant stars far beyond our solar system. Ever since the first ones were discovered in the 1990s, astronomers have turned their attention to these distant worlds to understand more about them. Now, for the first time, scientists have detected radio signals coming directly from one of these planets, a massive gas giant named β Pictoris b.
The fall equinox is Tuesday, when light and darkness split the day evenly. It marks the beginning of fall for the Northern Hemisphere and the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere.
How much can we really trust a measurement? And how much data do researchers need to collect to draw reliable conclusions? Mohammad Reza Seydi at Umeå University has developed and tested new statistical methods to provide better answers to those questions.
Recent heat waves in Europe have been intensified by the greenhouse gases emitted since nations committed to limiting global warming under the 2015 Paris Agreement, according to a Sep. 22 study published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The ongoing El Niño is breaching the "super" threshold as Earth crosses into unprecedented climate territory. El Niño, officially underway as of June 11, is a climate pattern that's injecting extra heat into our already-warming world, threatening disruptive weather across the globe and a humanitarian crisis in some regions.While El Niño is part of a natural multiyear climate cycle, scientists have noticed that it has been rapidly strengthening like never before, intensified by human-driven climate change, and putting stressed natural systems under extra strain.In a new update this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center continues to foreca...
Researchers have developed an organoid-on-a-chip technology that verifies the efficacy of Parkinson's disease treatments in real time. The technology combines a stem cell–derived "mini-brain" with a nanoplasmonic sensor engineered to maximize light–matter interaction.
More and more details about 3I/ATLAS are filtering through the scientific process as time goes on. Our third known interstellar visitor attracted the attention of some of the world's most powerful observatories when it was discovered in July 2025, and some of those telescopes found something peculiar—the isotopes it contained appeared different. A new paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters (and available as a preprint on arXiv) by Kenji Furuya of the RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute in Japan and his co-authors shows that the isotopic discrepancy is likely due to the "low metallicity" of the stellar nursery in which 3I/ATLAS was born.
The newest “Dragon Hatchling” AI model is testing whether skipping words in intermediate reasoning could cut computational cost.
The president also said artificial intelligence should be rebranded as “super intelligence”
Scientists have identified a "sweet spot" in Earth's deep past when conditions were optimal for a proposed early stage of life to take hold — a phase known as the RNA World.The sweet spot was 4.33 billion years ago, although Earth may have become suitable for the RNA World as early as 4.4 billion years ago, given that extreme bombardment by asteroids, comets and other rocky leftovers of planet formation had largely stopped by then, the researchers reported in a study published Tuesday (Sept. 22) in the journal Nature Communications.The findings give a more precise estimate of the RNA World's onset than previous studies based on geochemical modeling, biomolecular analyses and simulations of e...
A new study involving researchers from the Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, shows that methane concentration is among the key factors determining the composition of microbial communities at the margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The findings, published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, provide new insights into processes that influence carbon and methane cycling in a rapidly warming Arctic.
An international team of astronomers from ASTRON, JIVE, the University of Amsterdam and other institutions has found the first so-called "microblazar" in the Milky Way. This stellar system is composed of a massive star and a black hole with a jet that is pointed toward Earth. The researchers also identified the region where the jet hits a molecular cloud as a place where particles are accelerated to ultra-high energies, likely up to petaelectronvolts. This would make microblazars one of the most powerful particle accelerators in the galaxy. The research was appears in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
As the climate changes, species face a critical question: Can they evolve quickly enough to keep pace with their changing environment?
El Niño represents a "significant" threat to global health, the United Nations warned Tuesday, as the world braces for a cycle of the climate phenomenon predicted to be the most intense on record.
Most kids learn in elementary school that the seasons are caused by Earth rotating on a tilted axis during its yearly orbit around the sun. The substantial tilt, about 23.5 degrees, is thought to be the result of an ancient planetary body, Theia, smashing into Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, in the same cataclysmic collision that formed the moon.
Incendiamoeba cascadensis can replicate at 145° F, breaking the heat tolerance record for eukaryotes, a domain of life that includes plants and animals.
The research into how electromagnetic waves and radio frequency radiation influence health has been plagued by low-quality studies
“This is probably going to be the superlative El Niño event of our lives so far,” a climate scientist says
Mysterious trenches stretching for miles across the vast Nullarbor Plain in Australia are the surface scars of huge ancient caves collapsing deep underground, according to new research."They look like some kind of river channel, but they start and end so abruptly that it triggered us to investigate them," Matej Lipar, a researcher at the Anton Melik Geographical Institute in Slovenia and first author of the study, told Live Science.The Nullarbor Plain is an arid, flat, almost-treeless expanse in southern Australia. Nestled between the Great Victoria Desert and the Great Australian Bight coast, it has existed for more than 14 million years. Along the eastern edge of the Nullarbor Plain are fi...