A new anniversary image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals surprisingly fast evolution in a turbulent stellar nursery called the Trifid Nebula, where newborn stars sculpt gas and dust on human timescales. This Hubble shows the Trifid Nebula. Image credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / J. DePasquale, STScI. The Trifid Nebula was discovered by the French astronomer Charles Messier on June 5, 1764. Also...

A continent-like shelf beneath the Martian surface hints that a vast ocean once covered up to a third of Mars, reshaping the long-running debate over its watery past. This artist’s impression shows how Mars may have looked about 4 billion years ago. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO. While it is widely accepted that Mars once had some amount of liquid water on its surface, it is still unclear whether...

Hominins at the Acheulian site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel relied on driftwood gathered along a lakeshore to fuel their hearths, according to new research led by archaeologists from the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social and Bar-Ilan University; 780,000-year-old charcoal fragments from the site show that survival wasn’t about finding the perfect wood — it...

Paleontologists have identified a new genus and species of soft-bodied, tubicolous polyp medusozoan from well-preserved specimens found about 50 km northeast of Quebec City in Canada. Depiction of Paleocanna tentaculum individuals living in single tubes, as well as clusters of two or three tubes attached together. Image credit: Ramirez-Guerrero et al., doi: 10.1017/jpa.2025.10211. “Jellyfish and...

By studying almost 900 parrots living with humans, a team of researchers from the University of Northern Colorado, the University of Vienna, the Acoustics Research Institute at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown found evidence that some birds don’t just mimic speech, they may assign and use names to identify specific individuals. The African gray parrot...

New research by Professor Enrique Gaztañaga from the University of Portsmouth and the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona suggests some black holes formed before the Big Bang and survived a cosmic ‘bounce,’ potentially explaining dark matter, gravitational-wave backgrounds, and the early growth of supermassive black holes and galaxies. Gaztañaga proposes a new dark matter mechanism in...

New research led by University College Cork scientists suggests that both caffeinated and decaf coffee reshape the gut microbiome in ways tied to lower stress and improved psychological well-being, offering clues to the drink’s long-suspected health effects. Boscaini et al. reveal previously unrecognized effects of coffee on the microbiota-gut-brain axis, suggesting that microbiome profiles could...

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from eight fossils found in Stajnia Cave in Poland reveals a tight-knit group of Neanderthals who lived about 100,000 years ago, offering one of the clearest genetic snapshots yet of a single community in prehistoric Europe. At least seven Neanderthals lived in Stajnia Cave in what is now Poland around 100,000 years ago. Image credit: Tyler B. Tretsven. Stajnia Cave is situated...

By tracing magnetic signals preserved in 3.5-billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia, geoscientists have found the oldest direct evidence yet that parts of the planet’s outer shell were shifting across the globe, pushing the origins of plate motion deep into Earth’s early history. Hadean Earth. Image credit: Alec Brenner. “There has been a huge range of ages suggested for timing,” said...

New research led by University College Cork scientists suggests that both caffeinated and decaf coffee reshape the gut microbiome in ways tied to lower stress and improved psychological well-being, offering clues to the drink’s long-suspected health effects. Boscaini et al. reveal previously unrecognized effects of coffee on the microbiota-gut-brain axis, suggesting that microbiome profiles could...