VLSS J0318.9+5755, a strange, musical-note-shaped radio source hiding behind the Milky Way’s dusty disk, has turned out to be the glowing remains of an ancient black hole outburst inside a massive, colliding galaxy cluster. This composite image of the Treble Clef and its galaxy cluster contains X-rays from Chandra and eROSITA, radio data from LOFAR, and infrared data from UKIRT. Image credit: NASA...

Uranus and Neptune are often described as near-twins, but a new study suggests their chemistry, and possibly their histories, may differ more than expected. The materials making up Neptune and Uranus likely came from different regions in the protoplanetary disk around the young Sun. Image credit: SwRI. “Uranus and Neptune may resemble twins today, but their chemistry is telling us that they are...

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...

A single bone from southern Brazil indicates that herrerasaurids, among the first large meat-eating dinosaurs, persisted after the fauna around them changed. An artistic representation of the CAPPA/UFSM 0539 herrerasaurid dinosaur in life. Image credit: Johnny Pauly V. Mingau. Herrerasaurid dinosaurs lived during the Carnian age of the Late Triassic epoch, roughly 230 million years ago. They were...

Honeybees pack tens of thousands of nestmates into a small space, a setup that should invite disease. New research led by the University of Sydney suggests part of their protection is a map of antimicrobial chemistry laid out across the hive. Fernandes et al. investigated how chemical defenses contribute to colony-level immunity using the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) as a model system. Image...

Physicists at Northwestern University have held a single positron — the antimatter twin of the electron — in a trap for months and manipulated it one quantum jump at a time. They call their setup a ‘one-positron quantum cyclotron.’ Cloud chamber photograph by the American experimental physicist Carl David Anderson of the first positron ever identified. Antimatter is hard to study...

People who drink tea regularly appear less likely to develop heart and vascular disease than people who don’t, according to a new study published today in the Journal of Internal Medicine. Ye et al. found an 11% lower risk of vascular disease among regular tea drinkers. Image credit: Ye et al., doi: 10.1111/joim.70172. “This large study adds to existing observational evidence linking regular...

Researchers at the University of Exeter Medical School have produced the most comprehensive portrait to date of the ‘average’ human genome, drawn from the whole-genome sequences of nearly 900,000 adults in two large research biobanks: UK Biobank and the US-based All of Us program. The average human genome contains 4.3-5.3 million variants, of which 1.5% are rare. Image credit: Wright et al.,...

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;...

People who drink tea regularly appear less likely to develop heart and vascular disease than people who don’t, according to a new study published today in the Journal of Internal Medicine. Ye et al. found an 11% lower risk of vascular disease among regular tea drinkers. Image credit: Ye et al., doi: 10.1111/joim.70172. “This large study adds to existing observational evidence linking regular...