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...

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...

Long-overlooked fossils in the Western Australian Museum collection have been identified as a new species of koala. Named Phascolarctos sulcomaxilliaris, the ancient animal disappeared from Western Australia as drought and cold reshaped its habitat at the end of the Pleistocene. Reconstruction of Phascolarctos sulcomaxilliaris. Image credit: Nellie Pease. The modern koala (Phascolarctos cinereus)...

New research reveals that 3.4 billion years ago (Archean Eon), ancient microbes relied on molybdenum — a metal that was vanishingly rare at the time — and even experimented with tungsten. The findings may rewrite how astrobiologists search for life on other planets. Early Earth. Image credit: Peter Sawyer / Smithsonian Institution. Geochemical evidence suggests that molybdenum’s availability...

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 new study by Texas A&M University scientists offers fresh clues to a long-standing puzzle: why people who drink coffee tend to live longer and develop fewer chronic diseases. Their results suggest brewed coffee contains compounds that interact with a little-understood protein in the body, potentially influencing inflammation, aging and cancer-related processes. Hailemariam et al. demonstrate...

A landmark study of several butterfly lineages and a day-flying moth in South America shows that convergent evolution — when unrelated species arrive at the same solution — isn’t just a coincidence; it follows a surprisingly consistent genetic script, and this discovery could help predict how species adapt to climate change. Ben Chehida et al. studied convergent evolution in multiple...

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 new study by Texas A&M University scientists offers fresh clues to a long-standing puzzle: why people who drink coffee tend to live longer and develop fewer chronic diseases. Their results suggest brewed coffee contains compounds that interact with a little-understood protein in the body, potentially influencing inflammation, aging and cancer-related processes. Hailemariam et al. demonstrate...