Science
Research, climate, space and health, reported from the papers and the people behind them.
A Texas fossil misfiled for 40 years rewrites how insects got their six legs
A 324-million-year-old specimen collected in West Texas in 1985 and mistaken for a juvenile crustacean has been reclassified as a new stem-insect species with 24 limbs, filling a decades-old gap in the fossil record of how six-legged animals moved from water onto land.
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Galápagos 'Yellow' Sea Turtles Turn Out to Be Homebodies, Tracking Study Finds
A three-year satellite-tracking study of nine turtles finds that yellow-morph green sea turtles rarely leave the Galápagos Marine Reserve, complicating assumptions about long-distance Pacific migration.
A Deep Partial Lunar Eclipse Will Turn the Moon Coppery Red Tonight
North America gets its best view of a lunar eclipse until 2028 on Thursday night, when Earth's shadow will cover 96 percent of the moon's face, producing a blood-red glow just shy of totality.
The Same 'Glue' That Holds Tissue Together Also Helps Cells Swallow Their Dead Neighbors
A Barcelona research team finds that E-cadherin, the adhesion protein that seals epithelial tissue into watertight barriers, is repurposed at the site of a dying cell to grip, deform around and engulf it — a mechanical requirement for clearance that had gone largely unexamined.
Manhattan-sized ice island breaks from Greenland's Petermann Glacier
Satellite radar tracked years of fracturing before a 76-square-kilometer slab of floating ice separated on August 4, the glacier's largest loss since 2012 and the biggest Arctic calving event in six years.
Losing a gene targeted by anti-aging drugs made mice age faster, not slower, study finds
A Nature Aging study finds that mice bred without cGAS — an immune gene at the center of drug efforts to fight age-related inflammation — had shorter lifespans and more inflammation, after DNA-silencing machinery broke down and dormant 'jumping genes' reactivated across their genomes.
Sun's most active sunspot fires five flares, raising aurora and radio-blackout watch
Sunspot region AR4513 unleashed five M-class solar flares in a single day, and forecasters say a resulting solar wind stream could brighten northern lights for parts of the U.S. by the weekend.
Global Snakebite Death Toll May Be Triple Earlier WHO Estimates, Study Finds
A geostatistical analysis of two decades of data suggests snakebites kill up to 513,000 people a year and disable hundreds of thousands more, far exceeding the World Health Organization's current figures for a disease still classified as neglected.
Women with type 2 diabetes face higher mental health risk, men higher cardiovascular risk, UK study finds
An analysis of nearly 29,000 UK patients found that in the years after a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, women were more likely to develop anxiety, depression or other mental health conditions, while men were more likely to develop cardiovascular and kidney disease.
Astronomers trace first stellar stream found beyond the Milky Way, revealing hidden dark matter
A faint ribbon of stars torn from a globular cluster around a distant ultra-diffuse galaxy gives researchers a new way to measure dark matter in galaxies other than our own.
Ozempic may recruit "hunger neurons" to sustain weight loss, study finds
A Yale-led study in mice found that GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic engage, rather than silence, brain cells long associated with hunger — a finding that could help explain the drugs' unusually durable effects.
Myelin-making brain cells may actively drive age-related cognitive decline, study finds
A study of nearly 900 older Scots links dysfunction in oligodendrocytes, the cells that insulate nerve fibers, to steeper cognitive decline, and mouse experiments suggest the cells actively contribute to the change rather than merely reflecting it.
NASA clears Roman Space Telescope for launch, targets Aug. 30 liftoff
Mission managers completed a flight readiness review for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, clearing the $4.3 billion observatory for a Falcon Heavy launch from Kennedy Space Center no earlier than Aug. 30.
Global ocean sets hottest daily temperature on record — in August
The average temperature of the world's oceans reached 21.1 degrees Celsius on August 22, the highest daily reading ever recorded and an unusual one because sea temperatures normally peak in spring, not late summer.
CERN physicists coax the universe's primordial matter from the smallest atomic nuclei yet
Collisions of oxygen and neon nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider have produced clear signatures of quark-gluon plasma, the ultra-hot state of matter that filled the universe microseconds after the Big Bang, in the smallest nuclear systems yet shown to generate it.
Newly found star orbits so close to the Milky Way's black hole that it could reveal its spin
Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer have identified the fastest, closest-orbiting star yet seen around the Milky Way's central black hole, giving researchers a rare chance to directly measure how fast Sagittarius A* rotates.
Personalized mRNA vaccine slows melanoma recurrence in Phase 3 trial, Merck and Moderna say
An individualized cancer vaccine that trains the immune system against a patient's own tumor mutations, given alongside the immunotherapy pembrolizumab, met its main goals in a 1,137-patient trial of high-risk melanoma — the first Phase 3 success for this kind of therapy.