By tracking fierce winds racing through the atmospheres of seven ultra-hot Jupiters, astronomers have uncovered the strongest evidence yet that magnetic fields shape weather on worlds beyond our Solar System. This illustration shows magnetic activity in an ultra-hot Jupiter. Image credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser / L. Calçada. The magnetic field of Earth influences our atmosphere in complex ways, and...

The Northwest Africa (NWA) 12774, an angrite meteorite discovered in the Sahara Desert, likely in Mauritania, appears to be a fragment of a vanished protoplanet, offering the strongest evidence yet that a large planetary body formed and was later destroyed during the Solar System’s chaotic infancy. This is an artist impression of the protoplanetary disk around HD 107146. Image credit: A. Angelich...

For more than four and a half millennia, the Khufu Pyramid has stood on the Giza plateau, enduring dozens of earthquakes without serious structural damage. New research led by Egypt’s National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics offers a quantitative explanation for this remarkable durability. It shows that the structure’s natural vibration frequencies differ sharply from those of...

Tiny colonial animals called bryozoans were long thought to have appeared tens of millions of years after the Cambrian explosion. Extraordinary fossils found 520-million-year-old rocks in China prove these animals were there all along. Reconstruction of the Early Cambrian seafloor, depicting colonies of Protomelission gatehousei and Dayingomelission hexaclitia living among archaeocyath reefs in shallow...

Euplotes gigatrox, a new species of ciliate collected from a seawater filtration system on the Caribbean Island of Curaçao, can transform into a cannibalistic ‘supergiant,’ raising new questions about the complexity of life at the microscopic scale. Euplotes gigatrox. Image credit: Ben Larson & Samuel Lord. “Ciliates of the genus Euplotes have attracted attention since the earliest days...

Mathematicians from University College London and the University of California, Davis, have published a mathematical proof that the Universe’s accelerating expansion can be explained without dark energy, dealing a serious blow to the Lambda-cold dark matter model — the standard cosmological model that has stood for nearly 30 years. Alexander et al. provide a mathematical proof that instabilities...

In a small randomized trial in the United Kingdom, adults who added a serving of 100% fruit juice or a smoothie to a healthier diet reported lower depression scores after four weeks. People who drink a glass of 100% fruit juice or a smoothie each day as part of the UK’s 5-a-day healthy eating guidance see improvements in their mental wellbeing. Image credit: Joseph Mucira. “While most people...

Scientists have extracted and analyzed proteins from the tooth enamel of six Homo erectus individuals who lived in China roughly 400,000 years ago, offering an unprecedented glimpse into the genetic makeup of one of humanity’s most successful and far-ranging ancestors. Their results suggest that Homo erectus may have carried genetic variants that were later passed to Denisovans and eventually...

Unusual gases rising from geothermal springs within the Kafue Rift of Zambia suggest a deep fracture in Earth’s crust could mark the early stages of a new tectonic boundary. Location map of the extensional zone within the Central African Plateau of Zambia. The Kafue Rift is connected to the Luano and Luangwa rifts to the NE, and the Western branch of the EARS at the Rukwa rift (RRB) and Rungwe...

Chemical traces preserved in ancient rocks indicate that marine environments were deteriorating long before the catastrophe that wiped out vast numbers of species at the end of the Triassic period, around 201 million years ago. Early Earth. Image credit: Peter Sawyer / Smithsonian Institution. “The latest Triassic contains one of the most severe mass extinctions in the history of the planet, the...