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...

An international team of paleontologists has identified a new species of early sauropodomorph dinosaur in Zimbabwe, adding to growing evidence that southern Africa hosted a richer diversity of dinosaurs during the Late Triassic epoch than previously recognized. Life reconstruction of Musango matusadonaensis. Image credit: Mark Witton. The newly described dinosaur species lived in what is now Zimbabwe...

In a new study of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), scientists found that embraces, touches and other reassuring gestures before competition for food were linked to more peaceful sharing, suggesting the roots of human social touch stretch back at least six million years. Examples of bonobo and chimpanzee reassurance behaviors. Image credit: Z. Clay / J.S. Brooker. “Social...

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 set of 1.43-million-year-old fossil footprints preserved along the margin of an ancient lake in northern Kenya is offering paleoanthropologists new evidence about the size, gait and social lives of the beings who made them and reopening questions about which species they belonged to. One of 1.43-million-year-old footprints found at the GaJi10 site in the Koobi Fora Formation in northern Kenya;...