Named Elias 2-24b, the newly confirmed exoplanet is estimated to be less than 1 million years old — so young it is likely still gaining mass from the protoplanetary disk surrounding its star. An artist’s concept depicting Elias 2-24b, the youngest exoplanet detected to date, still growing within the disk of gas and dust surrounding its young host star. Image credit: W.M. Keck Observatory...

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...

Trogons — a group of colorful, medium-sized birds that live in tropical and subtropical forests around the world — are recognizable by an odd feature: a foot in which the second toe is permanently reversed. A newly described trogon species from the Early Eocene of Denmark, one of the earliest members of the group, lacked a fully reversed second toe. The holotype of Daniatrogon kochi from...

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...

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...

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...

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...