For the first time, astronomers have directly detected radio emission from a planet beyond our Solar System. This artist’s impression shows how the gas giant exoplanet inside the disc of Beta Pictoris may look. Image credit: L. Calçada / ESO. First discovered in 2008 by astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, Beta Pictoris b is a gas giant 9 to 13 times the mass of Jupiter. The planet...

A new analysis of nearly 1,000 ice grain measurements from Saturn’s E ring shows that Enceladus’ salty ocean spray freezes and fragments in a more complex way than planetary scientists previously thought. Type 3 ice particles are a major compositional group within Enceladus’ plume and Saturn’s E ring and are thought to represent frozen micrometer-sized aerosolized droplets of Enceladus’...

Roughly 18,000 years ago, in what is now northern Ukraine, artists carved small female figurines from mammoth ivory and covered them with zigzags and meanders. New research suggests those designs were not purely invented, they appear to echo the natural patterns inside the tusk. Mizyn figurines. Image credit: Radchenko et al., doi: 10.1038/s40494-026-02988-5. “The study of Upper Paleolithic figurines...

A tubular marine creature that lived on the seafloor more than 540 million years ago may have survived in toxic, sulfur-rich waters by teaming up with bacteria. Reconstruction of Conotubus hemiannulatus and its symbiotic relationship with sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. Image credit: David Fike. The ancient animal, known as Conotubus hemiannulatus, lived in the final stretch of the Ediacaran period, shortly...

Clostridium immunis, a human gut bacterium, secretes a large sugar molecule that can shrink visceral fat and curb weight gain in mice, according to a paper published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe. Yee Tan et al. discovered a human commensal bacterium, Clostridium immunis, which prevents and treats obesity in mice by secreting a phosphocholine-modified exopolysaccharide (EPS). Image credit:...

Physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have found evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into a ‘virtual’ photon and a real photon, which in turn produces a pair of leptons. This pathway, known as H→γ*γ→llγ, occurs in just one in about 10,000 Higgs decays, making it one of the particle’s most elusive behaviors. Event display of a candidate Higgs...

Clostridium immunis, a human gut bacterium, secretes a large sugar molecule that can shrink visceral fat and curb weight gain in mice, according to a paper published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe. Yee Tan et al. discovered a human commensal bacterium, Clostridium immunis, which prevents and treats obesity in mice by secreting a phosphocholine-modified exopolysaccharide (EPS). Image credit:...

Bats make up more than one fifth of all living mammal species, yet where and when they first took to the air has been debated for decades. An analysis of 103 bat genomes points to the European continent as the birthplace of the only mammals capable of powered flight, overturning earlier theories that favored Africa, Asia or North America. The findings come from the Bat1K consortium, an international...

Zircon crystals and impact-altered minerals show that a massive asteroid slammed into what is now the Pilbara region of Western Australia about 3 billion years ago. The North Pole Dome crater: (A) simplified map of the East Pilbara Terrane (EPT, Western Australia), showing Paleoarchean granite domes (pink) and greenstone belts (greens and blues); the North Pole Dome (NPD) lies near the terrane center;...

Sitting next to a loved one doesn’t just feel good, it may make the body work less hard, according to a new study that measured blood sugar, skin temperature and stress responses in people tested alone and with their partners (romantic partner in the adult experiments and the mother in the infant experiment). Social Physiology refers to the extent to which physiological regulation operates more...