Astronomers have discovered a rocky exoplanet about twice Earth’s size just 25 light-years away, orbiting in the habitable zone of its parent star, Gliese 3378. An artist’s conception of the view from the surface of Gliese 3378b. Image credit: Nikolai Berman / UC Irvine. Gliese 3378, also known as GJ 3378, LHS 1805 or TIC 322347050, is a red dwarf star located 25 light-years away in the northern...

NASA’s Perseverance rover has uncovered the most extensive evidence yet of complex organic molecules on Mars, detecting macromolecular carbon in rocks from the Bright Angel formation in Jezero Crater. The discovery does not constitute evidence of alien life, but it strengthens the case that the building blocks of life may have been widespread on the Red Planet billions of years ago. This artist’s...

When paleoanthropologists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, the tiny, small-brained species quickly earned a reputation as an evolutionary surprise. The extinct hominin was thought to have hunted elephant-like animals and controlled fire despite standing barely 109 cm (3.5 feet) tall and possessing a brain roughly one-third the size of a modern...

A small fossil collected on an Antarctic island more than four decades ago is a tail vertebra of a titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur that roamed Antarctica roughly 83 million years ago, according to a new paper in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. The discovery represents only the second sauropod body fossil known from Antarctica, although it was the first dinosaur bone to be collected from...

Biologists at the University of Minnesota say they have built a synthetic cell — made entirely from non-living chemical components — that can complete a full life cycle: taking in nutrients, growing, copying its genetic material, dividing into daughter cells and passing along beneficial mutations to the next generation. Called SpudCell, their project marks a major breakthrough in biological...

Physicists with LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have detected the elusive Ωcc⁺ baryon, a particle containing two charm quarks and one strange quark, completing a long-sought family of doubly charmed baryons first predicted over half a century ago. An artist’s impression of the doubly charmed Ωcc⁺ baryon. Image credit: Daniel Dominguez / CERN. “Quarks are basic...

A large review of clinical trials published this week in the journal PAIN suggests that melatonin — the over-the-counter sleep supplement taken by millions of people — may offer meaningful relief for patients suffering from chronic musculoskeletal conditions such as low back pain, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia. Melatonin showed modest benefits for musculoskeletal pain in a new analysis,...

For the first time, researchers have extracted ancient human DNA directly from the walls of a cave. Although their results do not conclusively link ancient DNA preservation to the generation of cave art, they show that traces of human DNA can persist on cave walls for thousands of years. Representative rock art figures from each of the 11 archaeological sites analyzed by Bossoms Mesa et al. Image...

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;...

When paleoanthropologists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, the tiny, small-brained species quickly earned a reputation as an evolutionary surprise. The extinct hominin was thought to have hunted elephant-like animals and controlled fire despite standing barely 109 cm (3.5 feet) tall and possessing a brain roughly one-third the size of a modern...