New images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope capture the barred spiral galaxy Messier 77 as a whirlpool of glowing dust, newborn stars and a brilliantly active core. This image of Messier 77 from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) highlights its swirling spiral arms, the dust in its disk and its piercingly bright core like never before. The bright orange lines appearing to radiate...

Space debris — ranging from defunct satellites and discarded rocket stages to fragments from collisions — poses an ever-increasing threat to active spacecraft and human spaceflight. New research shows that surges in solar activity can accelerate the descent of space debris, reshaping how scientists predict satellite lifetimes and collision risks. Space junk begins to fall down much faster...

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 unearthed on a remote Argentine ranch belong to a new genus and species of macronarian sauropod dinosaur, according to an international team of paleontologists led by the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Reconstruction of Bicharracosaurus dionidei. Image credit: Felipe Cutro-Lev. The newly-described sauropod species lived on the southern supercontinent Gondwana about 157 million...

Genetic evidence suggests the familiar seabird is actually four separate species — including one previously unknown to science — with three now facing growing climate threats. Geographic distribution of the four species of gentoo penguins around the Southern Ocean. Image credit: Noll et al., doi: 10.1038/s42003-026-10081-7. Among seabirds, the gentoo penguin complex (Pygoscelis papua)...

New research by astronomers from the University of California, Riverside, Sam Houston State University and the University of Oklahoma suggests decaying dark matter could have triggered the rapid collapse of early gas clouds, helping supermassive black holes form far sooner than current theories allow. Aggarwal et al. show that the energy released from dark matter decay could alter the chemistry of...

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...

Using environmental DNA (eDNA) collected from waters more than 4 km deep off Western Australia’s Nyinggulu (Ningaloo) coast, researchers identified a total of 226 species across 11 major animal groups, ranging from creatures previously undetected in the area, such as the giant squid, to others thought to be new to science. A giant squid, at least 10-12 feet in length, approaches the Medusa’s...

If you’ve ever wondered how geologists know so much about ancient beaches and shallow oceans — from the paleoenvironment to the animals roaming around, the seasonality of the weather, and even the time of day when the ancient scene was preserved — they owe it all to the sand particles bound together by microbes, forming structures known as microbial mats. A planar microbial mat with...

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...