A new anniversary image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals surprisingly fast evolution in a turbulent stellar nursery called the Trifid Nebula, where newborn stars sculpt gas and dust on human timescales. This Hubble shows the Trifid Nebula. Image credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / J. DePasquale, STScI. The Trifid Nebula was discovered by the French astronomer Charles Messier on June 5, 1764. Also...

A continent-like shelf beneath the Martian surface hints that a vast ocean once covered up to a third of Mars, reshaping the long-running debate over its watery past. This artist’s impression shows how Mars may have looked about 4 billion years ago. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO. While it is widely accepted that Mars once had some amount of liquid water on its surface, it is still unclear whether...

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...

CT scans of a decades-old specimen from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History show a new species of short-snouted crocodylomorph with unusually strong jaws, offering a rare snapshot of ecological specialization in the Late Triassic epoch. Eosphorosuchus lacrimosa (left) is disturbed by Hesperosuchus agilis (right) near a Coelophysis carcass at what will become modern-day Ghost Ranch, New Mexico,...

By studying almost 900 parrots living with humans, a team of researchers from the University of Northern Colorado, the University of Vienna, the Acoustics Research Institute at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown found evidence that some birds don’t just mimic speech, they may assign and use names to identify specific individuals. The African gray parrot...

New research by Professor Enrique Gaztañaga from the University of Portsmouth and the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona suggests some black holes formed before the Big Bang and survived a cosmic ‘bounce,’ potentially explaining dark matter, gravitational-wave backgrounds, and the early growth of supermassive black holes and galaxies. Gaztañaga proposes a new dark matter mechanism in...

In new research, University of Galway’s Dr. Martin David Mulligan and his colleagues followed nearly 800 participants from the Framingham Heart Study for more than a decade and a half, examining whether vitamin D levels measured in their 30s were linked to changes in the brain in later life. They found that individuals with higher circulating levels of vitamin D had lower accumulations of tau —...

Scientists have extracted and analyzed DNA from 216 canid remains, including 181 from Paleolithic and Mesolithic Europe. The oldest data that they recovered are from a 14,200-year-old dog from the Kesslerloch site in Switzerland. Their results suggest that domesticated dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) predate farming and share deep ancestry with wolves (Canis lupus) from Eurasia, challenging ideas about...

By tracing magnetic signals preserved in 3.5-billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia, geoscientists have found the oldest direct evidence yet that parts of the planet’s outer shell were shifting across the globe, pushing the origins of plate motion deep into Earth’s early history. Hadean Earth. Image credit: Alec Brenner. “There has been a huge range of ages suggested for timing,” said...

New research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem shows that large language models (LLMs) form structured ‘trust’ assessments much like humans do, yet apply them more mechanically and, sometimes, with stronger, more consistent demographic bias. Large language models implement a coherent but rigid and sometimes biased model of interpersonal trust that only partially aligns with human judgment. As...