Science

Deadly hospital fungus survives antifungal drugs by duplicating its whole genome, study finds

A lab accident led UK researchers to discover that Candida auris, a drug-resistant fungus behind lethal hospital outbreaks, can copy its entire genome to boost its odds of evolving resistance — a strategy the scientists call "bet-hedging."

China's Chang'e-6 moon rocks suggest a new explanation for the lunar far side's thick crust

Geochemical analysis of rock fragments retrieved from the moon's far side indicates that lateral flow inside an early, global ocean of molten rock — not a later impact — pushed material unevenly toward the two hemispheres, researchers report in a new study.

NASA Telescopes Trace a Ghostly Radio 'Treble Clef' to a Galaxy-Cluster Collision Hidden Behind the Milky Way

A filament of radio waves shaped like a musical clef turns out to mark two massive galaxy clusters colliding in a dust-choked patch of sky that optical telescopes cannot see through, astronomers report.

Ancient Genome Rearrangement May Hold a Clue to Octopus Intelligence

A new genetic analysis of octopuses, squid and cuttlefish finds that an ancient reshuffling of their DNA rewired how genes near nervous-system development interact — a possible, still-unproven clue to how these boneless mollusks evolved unusually complex brains.

Scientists Trace a Mammal's Entire Cellular Family Tree for the First Time

Two companion studies used DNA-based molecular recorders built into mouse embryos to reconstruct, cell by cell, how a single fertilized egg becomes a body with organs — a milestone developmental biologists have pursued since the 1980s.

A newly discovered bacterial defense system works backward from every other known version

Gladstone Institutes researchers have identified a retron — a genetic module some bacteria use against viruses — that stays completely silent until infection, then switches on a lethal toxin, inverting the logic of every previously studied version of the system.

A Hybrid Quantum Computer Freezes a Particle With a Force It Never Touches

Oxford physicists built a trapped-ion device that plays the roles of both matter and force field at once, reproducing a 65-year-old quantum prediction inside a toy model of the theories that describe the subatomic world — and pointing to a new way of simulating physics that ordinary computers cannot touch.

Astronomers Catch a Star Slowly Devouring a Brown Dwarf Companion

A newly reported pair of ultra-compact binaries shows a small star pulling material from a brown dwarf roughly 300 light-years away — the first direct evidence that some substellar companions are consumed gradually, over possibly billions of years, rather than destroyed at once.

Scientists Have Mapped Earth's Climate Tipping Points. New Research Finds Attention to Them Is Wildly Uneven

An analysis of more than 20,000 scientific papers finds the Greenland ice sheet and a major Atlantic current dominate climate research, while permafrost collapse and another key ocean current — both with comparably low warming thresholds — have drawn only a fraction of the scrutiny.

Webb Telescope Traces Farthest Known Fast Radio Burst to a Surprisingly Young, Tiny Galaxy

A millisecond radio flash detected by a South African array in 2024 has been pinned to a dwarf galaxy from the universe's early star-forming peak, new Webb telescope data show, more than doubling the distance record for such bursts and bolstering the case that they come from young magnetars.

Using AI for just 10 minutes weakens your ability to solve problems on your own, study finds

A new peer-reviewed study of 1,222 people finds that briefly relying on a chatbot for answers leaves people less able — and less willing — to solve similar problems once the tool is taken away, raising concerns for students and anyone who leans on AI daily.

NASA turns a doomed cargo ship into a test bed for next-generation heat shields

Twelve capsules built largely by University of Kentucky students rode a Northrop Grumman cargo ship that undocked from the space station Friday, and will test heat-shield materials for future Mars and Titan missions as the spacecraft burns up next week.

A hyperactive sunspot region fires its fourth eruption toward Earth in four days

A sunspot cluster called AR4549 has thrown off four coronal mass ejections since Monday, and NOAA has revised its geomagnetic storm forecast three times this week as it tracks how they are converging on their way to Earth.

Neanderthals at a Spanish rock shelter relied on wood as much as stone, 20,000-year study finds

A nearly 600-piece record of wooden spears, bark trays and an unclassified club from the Abric Romaní site in Catalonia shows Neanderthals used wood systematically for weapons, containers and shelter, not just as fuel, researchers report.

Europe's New Climate Satellite Sends Back Its First Images

Sentinel-3C, launched three weeks ago, has returned its first ocean, ice and land data, which European officials say confirm the spacecraft is working as designed.

Long-Predicted "Backsplash" Galaxies May Have Finally Been Found Near the Pinwheel

A paper in The Astrophysical Journal, written by a University of California, Berkeley freshman who began the project in high school, reports three faint, starless dwarf galaxies near the Pinwheel Galaxy — two of them candidates for a population long predicted by simulations but never confirmed nearby.

Margaret Hamilton, Software Pioneer Behind the Apollo Moon Landings, Dies at 90

The woman who led Apollo's flight-software team and helped found the discipline of software engineering died Sept. 30; MIT confirmed her death this week.

An enormous, recurring cloud on Mars reveals a new way ice can form

A cloud that stretches nearly 1,800 kilometers across a Martian volcano's flank forms through a process never before documented on any planet, researchers reported this week, resolving a puzzle that has lingered since Europe's Mars Express spacecraft first photographed it in 2018.

Astronomers Find Possible First Planet Born From a Dead Star's Ashes

A chemical anomaly buried in 27-year-old Hubble data points to a Jupiter-sized world that may have formed after its star died, not before — a candidate for an entirely new class of planet.

NASA report details astronauts' eyewitness sightings of meteorite flashes on the moon

A newly released NASA science report formalizes how the four-person Artemis II crew documented faint flashes from meteorite strikes, surface colors, and the sun's corona during April's crewed lunar flyby, the first since the Apollo era.

Gamma-Ray Burst's Engine Stayed Active for a Month, Astronomers Find

A new analysis of a 2022 cosmic explosion finds its central engine kept flaring for nearly a month afterward — far longer than any gamma-ray burst on record — and researchers are still debating what kept it running.

Restoring the world's oyster reefs could be worth $12 trillion a year, study finds

A new global analysis finds the world's most degraded coastal habitat could deliver trillions of dollars in ecological value if fully rebuilt — but the study's own authors warn the number is a ceiling, not a forecast.

Brief vaping exposure triggers lasting lung injury and weakens defenses against viruses, study finds

A National Jewish Health study finds that even short bursts of e-cigarette vapor damage the lung's deepest tissue and leave it less able to fight influenza and SARS-CoV-2 for at least ten days afterward.

Physicist Francis Halzen wins 2026 Nobel Prize for turning Antarctic ice into a neutrino telescope

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored the Belgian-born University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher for conceiving and leading the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which buried thousands of light sensors a mile deep in South Pole ice and opened a new way of observing the universe.

Milky Way Survey Finds No Dark Matter Signal, But Narrows the Search

Six years of gamma-ray data from a telescope array in Namibia turned up no sign of dark matter annihilating at the galaxy's core, but the null result sets the tightest limits yet on several of the leading theoretical particle candidates, including the long-elusive thermal Higgsino.

Astronomers detect first confirmed minutes-long X-ray flash from a neutron-star merger

An international team led by University of Hong Kong researchers found that a brief gamma-ray burst was followed by nearly ten minutes of soft X-ray light, a previously unconfirmed phase that points to the birth of a magnetar.

Oklahoma's buried Ames crater is 100 million years younger than long believed

New zircon dating pushes the age of the 10-mile-wide Ames impact structure to about 370 million years ago, placing the ancient meteor strike near a major mass-extinction event rather than the period long assumed.

Juice Spacecraft's Earth Flyby Sharpens Its Long Approach to Jupiter

ESA's Jupiter-bound probe bent its path by 20 degrees in a precisely timed pass by Earth, a maneuver mission planners say will leave more fuel for studying the icy moons once Juice arrives in 2031.

Cedars-Sinai scientists identify enzyme that may slow fatty liver disease's most dangerous stage

A newly published mouse study finds that an enzyme called UBE2N helps liver cells clear damaged mitochondria and break down fat, and that losing it coincides with the shift from simple fatty liver to the more dangerous, scarring form of the disease.

Muon experiments on a simple ytterbium-antimony crystal reveal a spontaneous magnetic signature inside its superconducting state, a trait long thought confined to more structurally complex superconductors.

NASA's Roman telescope coronagraph passes first in-flight light test

Engineers confirmed this week that the planet-imaging instrument aboard NASA's newly launched Roman Space Telescope can hold its aim steady enough to photograph starlight-blocked targets, clearing the way for a months-long calibration campaign before science begins in 2027.

Satellite Data Reveal Nicaragua's Masaya Volcano Has Two Separate Magma Reservoirs

Six years of radar tracking show the volcano near Nicaragua's crowded capital region is fed by two independently behaving pockets of molten rock, complicating efforts to forecast its next move.

Chinese telescope detects lightest-known neutron star pair locked in decaying orbit

Astronomers using China's FAST radio telescope have found the lowest-mass double neutron star system on record, a tightly orbiting pair whose gravitational-wave-driven decay matches Einstein's general relativity almost exactly.

Webb telescope finds the scars of planet-shattering collisions across two dozen young star systems

Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have identified a rare class of dusty young star systems bearing the chemical fingerprints of violent impacts between Mars-sized and Moon-sized bodies, offering scientists their clearest look yet at the kind of collision believed to have formed Earth's Moon.

Squid bodies hide hundreds more hair cells than scientists knew, study finds

A first full-body map of the sensory cells covering squid skin turned up hundreds of previously undocumented hair cells — the same basic structures that let humans hear — giving researchers a new way to study how those cells work, and fail.

NASA, SpaceX launch Crew-13 to space station after three-week delay

A Falcon 9 carrying four astronauts lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Thursday, three weeks after a propellant leak grounded the mission, kicking off a roughly seven-month stay aboard the International Space Station.

Gut-targeted delivery could offer a needle-free path for mRNA vaccines and GLP-1 drugs

A Georgia Tech and Emory University study found that where a lipid nanoparticle is placed inside the gastrointestinal tract of mice determines which organ it reaches, opening a possible route to needle-free mRNA vaccines and metabolic drugs.

Long space missions linked to higher hip fracture risk in astronauts, study finds

A NASA-led study found that astronauts who spent more than 90 days in orbit suffered hip fractures at a higher rate, and at younger ages, than those on shorter missions or people who never left Earth.

Experimental antifibrotic drug shown to block a key form of cell-to-cell messaging

A University of Surrey study finds that SD-208, a compound developed to fight tissue scarring, sharply cuts the release of extracellular vesicles from heart cells by rerouting them into the cell's disposal system — a mechanism the researchers say is unrelated to the drug's original anti-fibrotic purpose.

Enceladus's ice geysers sort ocean chemicals into single grains, study finds

Cassini data and new lab experiments show Saturn's moon concentrates its ocean chemistry as spray freezes, a finding that could simplify the hunt for signs of life.

Giant rock carving in Sudan may depict an ancient Kushite ruler

A newly published survey of Sudan's Mahas region has documented a monumental petroglyph, later enclosed by a seventh-century church, that researchers say may be a rare portrait of a ruler from the Kingdom of Kush.

New Fossil Species Suggests Dinosaur Flight Evolved Twice, Independently

A newly described, 120-million-year-old fossil from northeastern China indicates that flight-related traits arose separately in birds and in a branch of their closest dinosaur relatives, rather than from a single shared origin, researchers report in Nature Communications.

Scientists in China identify new tick-borne virus behind unexplained fevers

A newly described pathogen, carried by a tick species already established across the eastern United States, turned up in roughly one of every ten patients tested for a related and more severe tick-borne disease.

South Korean researchers build a stacked chip that remembers motion as it happens

Engineers at KAIST, working with UNIST and POSTECH, layered ion-based transistors tuned to different response speeds into one 3D chip, giving wearable sensors a built-in sense of "just now" versus "a moment ago" without extra memory circuits.

Kidney and heart disease risk climbs fast after a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, study finds

A real-world analysis of more than 1.6 million patients, presented at Europe's largest diabetes conference, finds that within ten years of a type 2 diabetes diagnosis more than half develop chronic kidney disease, heart failure or die — with each condition accelerating the other.

ESA's Juice Spacecraft Slingshots Past Earth on Long Road to Jupiter

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer used Earth's gravity for a third assist Monday, a maneuver mission managers said replaced what would have been a much larger propulsive burn.

MIT team uses AI to make mRNA vaccines that survive a year without freezing

A machine-learning-guided redesign of the fatty capsules that carry mRNA lets vaccines withstand room temperature for up to a year, a shift that could ease delivery in places without reliable cold-chain freezers.

NASA-ISRO satellite tracks months of eruption at a reawakened Russian volcano

The NASA-ISRO radar satellite NISAR stitched 17 months of orbital passes into a time-lapse of Kamchatka's Krasheninnikov volcano, which began erupting for the first time in roughly five centuries days after a magnitude 8.8 earthquake in 2025.

Physicists Watch a Quantum "String" Snap Into New Matter

A 13-ion device at Duke recreated, in miniature, the process by which a stretched field of energy converts into new particle pairs — a snap otherwise glimpsed only inside colliders and in the instant after the Big Bang.

NASA's Crew-13 astronauts arrive in Florida ahead of Thursday launch to space station

Two NASA astronauts, a Canadian and a Russian cosmonaut reached Kennedy Space Center on Saturday to begin final preparations for a six-month mission to the International Space Station.

Astronomers Find a Planet Orbiting Its Star Backward, With No Culprit in Sight

A red dwarf system 72 light-years away hosts a small planet circling in the opposite direction to its star's spin — and for once, researchers can find no massive neighbor to blame for the tilt.

In a Stanford Lab, Sound Takes Its First Recorded Quantum Jump

A microscopic resonator wired to a superconducting qubit let researchers watch a single quantum of sound vanish from one energy state to the next, closing a gap that has stood since the same feat was performed with trapped ions and photons decades ago.

Scientists Describe Two New Sea Spider Species Found in the Salish Sea

University of British Columbia researchers say the finds are the first new sea spider species documented in the region in nearly a century.

Gravitational tug-of-war between Earth's core and mantle drives decades-long shifts in day length, study finds

A new analysis in Nature finds that gravitational pull between Earth's inner core and its mantle, not magnetic drag alone, is the dominant force behind multidecadal changes in the length of a day.

In a Material Already Inside Every Chip, Physicists Confirm a Rare Electrical Property

University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers show that hafnium oxide, the insulating compound inside the world's computer processors since 2007, is genuinely antiferroelectric, settling a decade-long scientific dispute and pointing toward smaller capacitors, refrigerant-free cooling and denser memory chips.

CERN Physicists Find Quantum Entanglement in Heavy Z Bosons

ATLAS and CMS researchers say paired Z bosons produced in Higgs boson decays show strong evidence of quantum entanglement, extending the effect to a new class of massive particles.