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Astronomers using China's FAST radio telescope have discovered a compact cloud of hydrogen with no visible stars or galaxy around it. This could be one of the strongest candidates yet for an isolated "dark galaxy," containing nearly 500,000 times the sun's mass in neutral hydrogen. The discovery paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Sept. 24.

The world's oceans help slow climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere, but how much they take up can vary throughout the year. New research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests these seasonal patterns are changing across the Indian Ocean, potentially affecting how it helps to regulate Earth's climate.

Archaeologists have discovered a faience workshop at a major temple complex in the ancient Nubian capital of Napata, showing how the rulers of ancient Kush used specialized craft production to reinforce royal power.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Some quantum systems are so complex that even the most powerful supercomputers struggle to simulate their behavior. One solution is quantum simulation: building a controllable quantum system in the lab and tuning it to mimic the one researchers want to understand.

Scientists know a great deal about how lions hunt, breed and survive, but the microscopic communities living inside them have remained largely unexplored. Now, a study of wild lions in Namibia is beginning to change that, while revealing how much biology is still missing from the world's genomic databases.

Poor access to health care, limited local influence over research priorities and an unequal distribution of scientific benefits are undermining public confidence in science, experts warn, following the release of a global trust survey.

Imagine a company that sells you equipment, invests money in your business and then rents back what you build with it. It's your supplier, your investor and your customer all at once.

When someone is badly injured, doctors urgently need two facts: the patient's blood type, so that a transfusion is safe, and their hematocrit, the share of the blood made up of red blood cells, which reveals blood loss or anemia. Hospitals measure both with large machines that need electricity and trained staff, which are often unavailable in ambulances, disaster zones or remote clinics.

DNA is not randomly distributed within the nucleus but is packaged with proteins into chromatin, which is precisely folded into complex three-dimensional structures. However, scientists have not fully understood how this complex three-dimensional (3D) organization is regulated or how it changes over time.

In a discovery that could offer a new way to control quantum properties in two-dimensional materials, researchers at Cornell have found that electrically sliding the layers of ultrathin graphene can switch the material between distinct magnetic states that persist even after the voltage is removed.

When scientists talk about scavengers, you might imagine an animal sniffing out or stumbling across a carcass, eating as much as possible and slinking away.

The ocean beneath Saturn's moon Enceladus lies under kilometers of ice, but some of its contents do reach the surface. Jets near the south pole spray out water vapor and icy particles, offering a way to investigate the hidden ocean without drilling down to it.

Some 23,000 years ago, during the coldest part of the last ice age, people walked across the muddy margins of an ancient lake in what is now White Sands National Park, New Mexico.

A shipwreck off the coast of Turkey is the oldest shipwreck in the world, our team of archaeologists believes. There's little left of the ship itself, but based on clues from its cargo—including pottery vessels—a research team I was part of has tentatively dated the wreck to around 2700–2400 B.C.

When a massive environmental disaster strikes, do societies simply collapse and disappear? Or do people find a way to adapt, rebuild and recover?

A new international study led by Lund University examines what happened to population levels after the Kikai-Akahoya volcanic eruption in prehistoric Japan. The results paint a more complex picture than what had previously been believed. The paper is published in the journal Science Advances.

Researchers have developed and demonstrated a new hybrid photonic platform that integrates quantum emitters with photonic devices, providing a way to reliably control the interaction between photons and quantum information carriers. The chip-based platform, which combines gallium phosphide (GaP) with a diamond substrate, could help make quantum networks more practical by providing a way to connect quantum devices over long distances.

For the first time, scientists have observed bleached corals on the brink of death fully recover through brief contact with healthy clones. Ghostly white corals returned to full health in a laboratory setting within seven weeks, the fastest documented recovery to date, according to a study published in Science Advances.

In optical fibers, chips and other light-guiding devices, minor defects can scatter photons and disrupt their path. A new study demonstrates a way to reveal properties which, in certain systems, help light wave behavior withstand such flaws. The method could help speed up the search for new kinds of electronics and optical technologies, and contribute to more reliable quantum devices.

With about 30 visual pigments, compared to just three in humans, mantis shrimp possess a visual system that remains a mystery. Researchers from ULiège and Humboldt University in Berlin have, for the first time, analyzed these pigments one by one and discovered that some detect red light that very few animals can perceive. This finding, published in Science Advances, has potential applications in optogenetics.

Welcoming a new baby brings moments of joy, major milestones and significant expenses. And four in five parents say it costs too much to have a baby, according to the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

A Japanese space mission is about to launch towards Mars. But it will not land on the planet itself. Instead, the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission will focus on Phobos, the bigger of Mars's two small moons.

Graduate students in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences contributed to the first complete genome sequence of a harmful plant pathogen from an ornamental Prunus host through an active-learning activity in a plant disease diagnosis course.

Today, our planet is teeming with life, but it has not always looked the same. Long before forests reached skyward, animals walked on land and dinosaurs rose and fell, our planet was shaped by a much smaller, more unassuming form of life. And we can still find traces of it today.

As human activity has increased temperatures globally, determining the costs directly incurred by climate change is challenging. The effects of climate change on extreme weather events—such as hurricanes and heat waves—can be locally specific and variable, and observations and climate modeling might not accurately capture those effects.

Qubits, the quantum equivalent of digital bits, are fragile and prone to errors. That makes building reliable quantum computers extremely difficult. One fix has been to use traditional magic state distillation, which filters out flaws, but it is extremely resource-intensive.

Depending on the cultivar, higher concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere can significantly alter the protein composition of wheat. This affects not only baking quality but potentially also the tolerability of wheat products. This is the conclusion of a new study led by the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich. According to the study, the adaptation of crops to climate change should in the future focus not only on high yields but also

The strong El Niño currently under way in the Pacific Ocean raises the specter of marine heat waves and coral bleaching once again threatening Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef. And now new research has revealed the complex interplay of atmospheric patterns and weather systems thousands of kilometers apart that can combine in a recipe potentially fatal for coral reefs.

What happens when political violence is presented as a justified response to threat or injustice coming from an out-group? A study by Ursula Daxecker, director at the Max Planck Institute for Politics and Social Science in Göttingen, and Neeraj Prasad of the University of Amsterdam, published in The Journal of Politics, finds that legitimizing violence can increase public approval of both violence and the parties involved in it. Among BJP supporters, the effect went even further: when violence w

The European rabbit is a common sight in the British countryside today. Yet it was not always so. They are not native to the British Isles and are one of the most devastating invasive species.

Naming a chicken and describing its favorite habits is enough to make preschoolers choose poultry less often. This effect translates into verbal declarations and actual meal choices, but food preferences still most often win over empathy, according to a new paper by researchers from SWPS University.

Close social relationships are known to contribute to the survival of many animals, including humans. Maintaining social bonds over time, however, can also require effort and sacrifices.

Ever wonder what goes on inside the brain of a worm—how it processes information, responds to stimuli and perceives the world around it? Northeastern University researchers have opened up that can of worms, specifically the one containing C. elegans, a tiny roundworm that's one of the most extensively studied animals in biology.

A new study led by researchers at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) reveals that glaciers worldwide could lose ice faster than previously projected. Published in Nature Communications, the research shows that accounting for daily weather variability leads to more realistic simulations of glacier melt and results in greater projected ice loss by the end of the century. The findings highlight the importance of short-lived weather events, such as the exceptional

Whether we are waiting for a car windshield to defrost in winter or a warm drink to cool down, how long it takes for an object to settle into a stable, even temperature within its environment (thermal equilibrium) depends on numerous factors. These can include surface area, the material properties of an object and airflow.

Plants begin responding to spaceflight almost immediately after leaving Earth, according to a new University of Florida study that captured the earliest stages of biological adaptation during a commercial suborbital mission. Published in the journal npj Microgravity, the study reports the results of an experiment conducted by a UF astronaut during Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-26 flight on Aug. 29, 2024.

A University of Missouri astronomer is leading a team of 130 researchers from 62 institutions—including NASA, the California Institute of Technology, Princeton University and Harvard University—on an ambitious mission to capture an unprecedented view of the early universe.

Scientists have discovered a gene that determines whether Japanese snails develop shells that are left- or right-coiling—with implications for understanding the underlying handedness of our own bodies. The researchers from the University of Nottingham and Tohoku University studied wild Euhadra snails in Japan to understand what makes one snail a mirror image of another.

Alzheimer's disease is best known for its effects on memory and cognition, but the disease also involves changes in how brain cells produce and use energy. Mitochondria, the structures that supply much of a cell's energy, can become dysfunctional in Alzheimer's disease. At the same time, changes in blood flow and oxygen availability may place additional demands on brain tissue. Understanding how these processes interact could help researchers characterize metabolic changes that accompany the dis

New research from Michigan State University finds that popular music has gradually become less explicit about emotion and relationships—both across generations of artists and within artists' careers.

Japan is set to launch a spacecraft on the world's first mission to bring back samples from Phobos, one of the two small, potato-shaped moons orbiting Mars.

Standing on a verdant hill above Georgia's Black Sea coast, ornithologist Bart Hoekstra looked out over one of the world's greatest wildlife spectacles unfolding before him—then gunshots pierced the air.

Dozens of critically endangered orangutans have been rescued in recent weeks from rampant wildfires burning across Indonesia that have cloaked the region in toxic haze, conservation groups said.

Japanese scientists are readying a mission to Mars' moons to retrieve samples that could help unlock the origins of the solar system and life on Earth, in what aims to be the first round trip to the Martian region.

Ken Schreiber was 9 when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon in 1969—a moment he would never forget. Like Armstrong, he became a military fighter pilot.

Britain's Met Office says this year's El Niño is "unprecedented." Japan's weather agency has called it the strongest ever observed. U.S. forecasters say it still trails the biggest events in its record books.

Juan Mayorga smiled as a stingray glided across his computer screen, moving gracefully over the seabed near Portugal's Desertas Islands, part of the Madeira archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean.

A bumblebee-like insect that was last seen in France 150 years ago was spotted again in the Paris region in 2025.

Nearly 200 nations kicked off crucial U.N. biodiversity talks in Armenia on Monday as governments face pressure to salvage a landmark nature pact whose goals are slipping out of reach.