When the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS passed between ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) spacecraft and NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft in November 2025, scientists seized an once-in-a-lifetime chance: one spacecraft caught the comet’s glowing dayside, the other its dusty night side, simultaneously. In November 2025, 3I/ATLAS passed between ESA’s Juice spacecraft and NASA’s Europa...

When the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS passed between ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) spacecraft and NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft in November 2025, scientists seized an once-in-a-lifetime chance: one spacecraft caught the comet’s glowing dayside, the other its dusty night side, simultaneously. In November 2025, 3I/ATLAS passed between ESA’s Juice spacecraft and NASA’s Europa...

Hominins at the Acheulian site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel relied on driftwood gathered along a lakeshore to fuel their hearths, according to new research led by archaeologists from the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social and Bar-Ilan University; 780,000-year-old charcoal fragments from the site show that survival wasn’t about finding the perfect wood — it...

Fossils of a giant tortoise, a ground sloth, a lion-sized armadillo relative called pampathere, scimitar-toothed cats, horses, camels and mastodons found in Bender’s Cave on the Edwards Plateau of Texas may reveal a previously unknown warm period in the region roughly 100,000 years ago. An artist’s interpretation of mammals that lived during the Ice Age: fossils from similar species of an armadillo-like...

A study of radiation fog events over Pennsylvania has found that bacteria living inside fog droplets are actively growing and feeding on toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, revealing an unexpected biological force at work in the atmosphere. A foggy field in Pennsylvania has a little secret: its suspended water droplets form a habitat for helpful bacteria that eat air toxins. Image credit: Thi Thuong...

Researchers have developed a new method to identify whether black hole mergers occurred inside dense clouds of dark matter, potentially opening a fresh avenue for studying one of astronomy’s biggest mysteries. Gravitational waves observed by Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) twin detectors were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes...

A team of U.S. researchers has demonstrated, for the first time in human trials, a device that reads brain signals to automatically amplify the voice a listener wants to hear — a potential lifeline for the 430 million people worldwide with disabling hearing loss. Participants with intracranial electrodes listened to two competing, spatially separated conversations. Their neural signals were...

A new analysis of 470 flowering plant species finds that whole-genome duplication surged precisely during Earth’s violent environmental crises, suggesting nature keeps a backup plan hidden in plain sight. Chen et al. constructed a comprehensive genomic dataset of 470 flowering plant species and dated 132 ancient whole-genome duplication (WGD) events that are non-randomly distributed, revealing...

Unusual gases rising from geothermal springs within the Kafue Rift of Zambia suggest a deep fracture in Earth’s crust could mark the early stages of a new tectonic boundary. Location map of the extensional zone within the Central African Plateau of Zambia. The Kafue Rift is connected to the Luano and Luangwa rifts to the NE, and the Western branch of the EARS at the Rukwa rift (RRB) and Rungwe...

Earth experienced extreme climate swings during the Neoproterozoic epoch (one billion to 538.8 million years ago), including the Sturtian glaciation, when ice likely covered the planet. Explaining aspects of the geologic record and the survival of life through this event has been a longstanding puzzle. Additionally, geochronology indicates that the Sturtian glaciation lasted for 56 million years...