Named Elias 2-24b, the newly confirmed exoplanet is estimated to be less than 1 million years old — so young it is likely still gaining mass from the protoplanetary disk surrounding its star. An artist’s concept depicting Elias 2-24b, the youngest exoplanet detected to date, still growing within the disk of gas and dust surrounding its young host star. Image credit: W.M. Keck Observatory...

Using data collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover, planetary scientists have revealed that a geologically puzzling formation in Jezero crater experienced multiple distinct episodes of water-related alteration, deepening its significance as a target in the search for ancient signs of life on Mars. The concentric feature in the East Margin of the Margin unit, Jezero crater, Mars. Image credit: Bedford...

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...

Dr. Dirk Knaust, a geologist with the Norwegian energy company Equinor ASA, has identified plesiosaur regurgitalites — the technical term for fossilized vomit — from preserved in rock cores drilled beneath the North Sea, offering a rare window into how these long-necked marine reptiles fed in the Middle and Late Jurassic seas. An artist’s impression of a plesiosaur feeding on the sea...

Bats make up more than one fifth of all living mammal species, yet where and when they first took to the air has been debated for decades. An analysis of 103 bat genomes points to the European continent as the birthplace of the only mammals capable of powered flight, overturning earlier theories that favored Africa, Asia or North America. The findings come from the Bat1K consortium, an international...

Physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have found evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into a ‘virtual’ photon and a real photon, which in turn produces a pair of leptons. This pathway, known as H→γ*γ→llγ, occurs in just one in about 10,000 Higgs decays, making it one of the particle’s most elusive behaviors. Event display of a candidate Higgs...

Scientists have long treated the brain as a single organ that grows from one pool of early cells. Stanford University neuroscientist Kyle Loh and colleagues challenge this view, arguing that the human brain is two distinct nervous systems that evolved separately and were joined together over hundreds of millions of years. The discovery could also help explain why researchers have struggled for decades...

Bats make up more than one fifth of all living mammal species, yet where and when they first took to the air has been debated for decades. An analysis of 103 bat genomes points to the European continent as the birthplace of the only mammals capable of powered flight, overturning earlier theories that favored Africa, Asia or North America. The findings come from the Bat1K consortium, an international...

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;...

Scientists have long treated the brain as a single organ that grows from one pool of early cells. Stanford University neuroscientist Kyle Loh and colleagues challenge this view, arguing that the human brain is two distinct nervous systems that evolved separately and were joined together over hundreds of millions of years. The discovery could also help explain why researchers have struggled for decades...