NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched August 30, 2026 at 7:26 a.m. EDT (11:26 UTC) aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, beginning a three-month, 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) journey to its operating post at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2). NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex...

Using a novel laboratory calibration, planetary researchers in Germany have produced the most reliable map yet of silica (SiO2) concentrations across the surface of Earth’s Moon, and a first silica estimate for Mercury. Their study is built around the Christiansen Feature (CF), a spectral signature in the mid-infrared that shifts predictably with a material’s silica content. This colorful view...

Long before Europeans arrived, cacao (Theobroma cacao) may have traveled far beyond its Central and South American homeland to reach Etowah, a major Mississippian-period city in what is now Georgia. An artist’s conception of Etowah, a Mississippian culture site located on the banks of the Etowah River in Bartow County, Georgia. Image credit: Herb Roe / Sci.News. “For decades archaeologists, historians,...

A single fossilized footprint found in volcanic mud on a remote Antarctic island is the first known trackway from a mammal in Antarctica, and the earliest evidence anywhere on the continent of a carnivorous mammal. Track-bearing slab T-373 from King George Island, Antarctica. Sclae bar – 10 mm. Image credit: Mansilla-Vera et al., doi: 10.1007/s00300-026-03539-1. The new specimen, a partial...

For nearly a century, scientists have treated the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) as a textbook case of convergent evolution — a marsupial that independently evolved to look and hunt like a gray wolf (Canis lupus) despite being separated from placental carnivores by 160 million years of evolution. In a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from Flinders University,...

New results from the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) offer a tantalizing hint of Higgs bosons interacting with one another, a process that could reveal whether the Standard Model’s picture of the Universe is complete. Candidate event displays of double-Higgs boson production as recorded by ATLAS (left) and CMS (right). Image credit: CERN. The discovery of the...

Not all diets are created equal when it comes to reversing the metabolic damage of obesity, even when they produce the same amount of weight loss, according to a new randomized clinical trial published in the journal Cell Metabolism. Diet macronutrient content affects the cardiometabolic benefits of weight loss. Image credit: Petersen et al., doi: 10.1016/j.cmet.2026.07.020. “Obesity causes a constellation...

Neanderthals vanished roughly 42,000 years ago, but a piece of their biology appears to be quietly at work in some people today, according to a new study led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Aspects of Neanderthal anatomy live on in people today. Image credit: Holger Neumann / Neanderthal Museum. “Neanderthals are the most well-known among archaic human...

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;...

Not all diets are created equal when it comes to reversing the metabolic damage of obesity, even when they produce the same amount of weight loss, according to a new randomized clinical trial published in the journal Cell Metabolism. Diet macronutrient content affects the cardiometabolic benefits of weight loss. Image credit: Petersen et al., doi: 10.1016/j.cmet.2026.07.020. “Obesity causes a constellation...