Astronomers have discovered a dormant supermassive black hole 30,000 light-years from the center of WISEA J014656.04-152214.7 — a massive galaxy located about 750 million light-years away in the constellation of Cetus — after it briefly lit up by tearing apart a star. TDE 2025abcr. Image credit: Stein et al., doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ae77f3. Theorists have predicted that wandering black...

A new look at more than two decades’ worth of archival data from NASA’s Spirit mission suggests that the Martian soil may hold iron-bearing minerals — hematite and altered magnetite — that were too faint for scientists to detect in real time during the mission. NASA’s Spirit rover on Mars. Image credit: NASA. “From early 2004, Spirit Rover explored the surface of Gusev crater...

Archaeologists in southwestern Germany have unearthed two miniature bird figurines carved from mammoth ivory, among the smallest and most delicate examples of Ice Age art ever found. Two bird figurines found at Hohle Fels Cave in Germany. Image credit: Ralf Ehmann / University of Tübingen / Museum of Prehistory and Ice Age Art. The two ancient figurines, roughly 2 cm (0.8 inches) long and weighing...

Paleontologists have identified the earliest-known cephalopod equipped with a siphuncle — a tubular extension of the mantle found in shelled cephalopods — pushing back the fossil record of this key evolutionary feature to the Early Cambrian, roughly 520 million years ago. Life reconstruction of Eoceras shaanxiense. Image credit: Dinghua Yang. Cephalopods are a group that today includes...

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology have found that moth wings are equipped with odor-detecting receptors, suggesting the insects use their wings — not just their antennae — to sense chemical cues in the air while flying. Reda Ismaieel et al. examined the olfactory capabilities of the wings of the tobacco hawkmoth (Manduca sexta). Image credit: Reda Ismaieel et...

Using the largest sample yet of particles called beauty mesons, physicists with the CMS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) refined a decades-old test of the subtle imbalance that let our Universe exist at all. Neutral beauty mesons can turn into their own antimatter opposite and back again. Image credit: Ansar Iqbal / CMS. One of the greatest mysteries in physics is why the Universe...

A large British study spanning more than 70 years has found that people who experience chronic money struggles over their working lives show measurable declines in memory and processing speed by their 50s, along with signs of accelerated brain shrinkage decades later — with men, those raised in poorer households, and carriers of a key Alzheimer’s risk gene (APOE-ε4) appearing most vulnerable. Long-term...

In an analysis of 390 traditionally cultivated cacao trees representing traditional Amazonian varieties, researchers identified four previously unknown genetic lineages, with two showing ancestry linked to exceptional flavor potential and offering new opportunities for growers and chocolate makers. Motilal et al. collected cacao samples from eight departments of Peru. Image credit: Fernando Graniel. Cacao...

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;...

A fossilized skull fragment of Homo sp. unearthed in central Spain offers paleoanthropologists a fresh window into the story of ancient humans who lived in Europe hundreds of thousands of years ago. A Homo heidelbergensis, a Neanderthal and a Cro-Magnon. Image credit: SINC / José Antonio Peñas. The fossil is a fragment of a parietal bone — one of the bones that form the sides and top of the...