Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have analyzed the atmosphere of a massive exoplanet orbiting the white dwarf WD 1856+534. Their results provide a window into the ultimate fate of giant planets orbiting stars with masses similar to our Sun. WD 1856b is a gas giant that orbits its star at a distance 50 times closer than Earth orbits the Sun. Image credit: NASA / ESA /...

NASA’s Perseverance rover has uncovered the most extensive evidence yet of complex organic molecules on Mars, detecting macromolecular carbon in rocks from the Bright Angel formation in Jezero Crater. The discovery does not constitute evidence of alien life, but it strengthens the case that the building blocks of life may have been widespread on the Red Planet billions of years ago. This artist’s...

For decades, the discovery of stone spear points lying next to proboscidean (mammoth, mastodon, and gomphothere) bones has been treated as archaeology’s version of a smoking gun: proof that America’s first well-documented culture, the Clovis people, were megafauna hunters who helped drive the great beasts to extinction roughly 13,000 years ago. A new study argues that conclusion has never actually...

A small fossil collected on an Antarctic island more than four decades ago is a tail vertebra of a titanosaurian sauropod dinosaur that roamed Antarctica roughly 83 million years ago, according to a new paper in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. The discovery represents only the second sauropod body fossil known from Antarctica, although it was the first dinosaur bone to be collected from...

Biologists at the University of Minnesota say they have built a synthetic cell — made entirely from non-living chemical components — that can complete a full life cycle: taking in nutrients, growing, copying its genetic material, dividing into daughter cells and passing along beneficial mutations to the next generation. Called SpudCell, their project marks a major breakthrough in biological...

Physicists with LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have detected the elusive Ωcc⁺ baryon, a particle containing two charm quarks and one strange quark, completing a long-sought family of doubly charmed baryons first predicted over half a century ago. An artist’s impression of the doubly charmed Ωcc⁺ baryon. Image credit: Daniel Dominguez / CERN. “Quarks are basic...

A large review of clinical trials published this week in the journal PAIN suggests that melatonin — the over-the-counter sleep supplement taken by millions of people — may offer meaningful relief for patients suffering from chronic musculoskeletal conditions such as low back pain, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia. Melatonin showed modest benefits for musculoskeletal pain in a new analysis,...

For the first time, researchers have extracted ancient human DNA directly from the walls of a cave. Although their results do not conclusively link ancient DNA preservation to the generation of cave art, they show that traces of human DNA can persist on cave walls for thousands of years. Representative rock art figures from each of the 11 archaeological sites analyzed by Bossoms Mesa et al. Image...

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;...

For decades, the discovery of stone spear points lying next to proboscidean (mammoth, mastodon, and gomphothere) bones has been treated as archaeology’s version of a smoking gun: proof that America’s first well-documented culture, the Clovis people, were megafauna hunters who helped drive the great beasts to extinction roughly 13,000 years ago. A new study argues that conclusion has never actually...