Astronomy

Astronomers Scan Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS for Alien Radio Signals

This image from the Subaru Telescope shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Image credit: NAOJ.

Using the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array, a 42-element radio interferometer at Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Hat Creek, California, astronomers probed 3I/ATLAS for artificial radio transmissions but found only human-made interference. This image from the Subaru Telescope shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Image credit: NAOJ. 3I/ATLAS is the third confirmed object from another star...

Space Exploration

Lunar Meteorite Preserves Evidence of Colossal Asteroid Strike

XRF map of 7.53 g slice of NWA 12593: calcium (Ca) and iron (Fe) illustrate the location and diversity of clasts; sulfur (S) highlights the location of cracks and terrestrial weathering. Image credit: Crow et al., doi: 10.1130/G54386.1.

Planetary scientists analyzing a lunar meteorite known as Northwest Africa (NWA) 12593 have uncovered evidence of an asteroid impact that occurred 3.5 billion years ago on the Moon, helping to reconstruct a period of intense bombardment that left lasting marks across the inner Solar System. XRF map of 7.53 g slice of NWA 12593: calcium (Ca) and iron (Fe) illustrate the location and diversity of clasts;...

Archaeology

Spanish Cave Sanctuary Reveals More Than 11,500 Years of Activity

Sala Keimada, a chamber of Cueva Palomera in Burgos, Spain. Image credit: Ortega-Martínez et al., doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105818.

New radiocarbon dates from Sala Keimada, a hard-to-reach chamber of Cueva Palomera in the province of Burgos, northern Spain, suggest that generations of people returned to the sacred space from the end of the Ice Age through the Iron Age, leaving behind art, structures and offerings. Sala Keimada, a chamber of Cueva Palomera in Burgos, Spain. Image credit: Ortega-Martínez et al., doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105818. “Cueva...

Paleontology

Earth’s Earliest Animals May Have Thrived Too Easily to Evolve

Artist’s reconstruction of the Fractofusus community: the bottom right features a large Fractofusus around which there are 5 to 8 medium specimens clustered; each of the medium specimens also has small specimens clustered around them; the small specimens therefore form an independent double cluster pattern, namely clusters of clusters. Image credit: C.G. Kenchington.

Fossils from some of the oldest-known animals on Earth, dating from 574 million years ago (Ediacaran period), suggest that cloning, not competition, dominated the Ediacaran seas, slowing evolution until environmental stress helped drive the rise of sexual reproduction and a burst of biodiversity. Artist’s reconstruction of the Fractofusus community: the bottom right features a large Fractofusus...

Physics

Schrödinger’s Cat Gets Stranger: Physicists Demonstrate Quantum States No One Has Seen Before

Quantum mechanics defies classical intuition, most famously through Schrödinger’s cat, where systems exist in superpositions of opposing states. Such superpositions are central to quantum technologies. Quantum ‘cat’ states have been realized in harmonic oscillators, but implementations were largely limited to Fock, displaced, or Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill states. A different class of macroscopic superpositions, where an oscillator is squeezed along orthogonal axes so that its positional variance is simultaneously larger and smaller than the Heisenberg limit, was proposed previously but remained unrealized. Saner et al. introduce a trapped-ion hybrid spin-oscillator system enabling an experimental realization of these ‘siblings’ of Schrödinger’s cat. Image credit: Saner et al., doi: 10.1103/k1xk-yt42.

Physicists at the University of Oxford have engineered a new class of ‘cat states’ — quantum superpositions constructed not from ordinary wave packets, but from deeply exotic, nonclassical components — opening unexpected paths toward more resilient quantum computers. Quantum mechanics defies classical intuition, most famously through Schrödinger’s cat, where systems exist in superpositions...

Medicine

Daily Glass of Fruit Juice May Lift Your Mood: Study

People who drink a glass of 100% fruit juice or a smoothie each day as part of the UK’s 5-a-day healthy eating guidance see improvements in their mental wellbeing. Image credit: Joseph Mucira.

In a small randomized trial in the United Kingdom, adults who added a serving of 100% fruit juice or a smoothie to a healthier diet reported lower depression scores after four weeks. People who drink a glass of 100% fruit juice or a smoothie each day as part of the UK’s 5-a-day healthy eating guidance see improvements in their mental wellbeing. Image credit: Joseph Mucira. “While most people...

Genetics

Secret to Sloths’ Slow Life May Lie in Ancient ‘Jumping Genes’

The Linnaeus’s two-toed sloth (Choloepus didactylus) at London Zoo. Image credit: Dick Culbert / CC BY 2.0.

Along with armadillos and anteaters, sloths are members of Xenarthra, the only clade of placental mammals to have originated in South America. In new research, scientists sequenced and analyzed chromosome-level genomes of the Linnaeus’s two-toed sloth (Choloepus didactylus) and the southern anteater (Tamandua tetradactyla). They identified unusual genetic elements tied to energy production in the...

Geology

Lunar Meteorite Preserves Evidence of Colossal Asteroid Strike

XRF map of 7.53 g slice of NWA 12593: calcium (Ca) and iron (Fe) illustrate the location and diversity of clasts; sulfur (S) highlights the location of cracks and terrestrial weathering. Image credit: Crow et al., doi: 10.1130/G54386.1.

Planetary scientists analyzing a lunar meteorite known as Northwest Africa (NWA) 12593 have uncovered evidence of an asteroid impact that occurred 3.5 billion years ago on the Moon, helping to reconstruct a period of intense bombardment that left lasting marks across the inner Solar System. XRF map of 7.53 g slice of NWA 12593: calcium (Ca) and iron (Fe) illustrate the location and diversity of clasts;...