For almost five decades, Saturn’s north pole has been famous for hosting a bizarre, six-sided jet stream known as the hexagon, a feature first spotted by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s and still churning today. Astronomers had long wondered whether the ringed planet’s southern hemisphere might hide a mirror-image structure. Now, it turns out the south pole has been quietly growing something...

Using a novel laboratory calibration, planetary researchers in Germany have produced the most reliable map yet of silica (SiO2) concentrations across the surface of Earth’s Moon, and a first silica estimate for Mercury. Their study is built around the Christiansen Feature (CF), a spectral signature in the mid-infrared that shifts predictably with a material’s silica content. This colorful view...

Long before Europeans arrived, cacao (Theobroma cacao) may have traveled far beyond its Central and South American homeland to reach Etowah, a major Mississippian-period city in what is now Georgia. An artist’s conception of Etowah, a Mississippian culture site located on the banks of the Etowah River in Bartow County, Georgia. Image credit: Herb Roe / Sci.News. “For decades archaeologists, historians,...

Paleontologists studying a fossil unearthed in southern Manitoba, Canada, have identified what they believe are two bite marks on the internal skeleton of the ancient giant cephalopod Enchoteuthis, offering rare evidence of predator-prey interactions in the Cretaceous seas that once covered the middle of North America. Reconstruction of a mosasaur and large fish preying on an injured Enchoteuthis,...

Size, it turns out, is not everything when it comes to insect vision. According to a new paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some of the smallest bees studied have photoreceptors as sharp as those of much larger honeybee drones. The blue-banded bee Amegilla murrayensis. Image credit: Callin Switzer. “The honeybee (Apis mellifera) — only one of...

In a pair of papers published in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team of MIT physicists has shown that the neutrino laser — a concept proposed just a year ago — cannot actually be built, no matter how advanced the technology becomes. In 2025, B.J.P. Jones & J.A. Formaggio devised an idea for a laser that shoots a beam of neutrinos. Put forward by MIT Professor Joe Formaggio...

In a study of 2,266 workers in Finland, evening-type people, or night owls, were up to three times more likely to be treated for depression or anxiety than morning types, with poor work-life balance identified as a key contributing factor. Merikanto et al. showed that evening-types had more issues regarding work spillover to personal life and poor recovery from work and that these factors moderated...

Neanderthals vanished roughly 42,000 years ago, but a piece of their biology appears to be quietly at work in some people today, according to a new study led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Aspects of Neanderthal anatomy live on in people today. Image credit: Holger Neumann / Neanderthal Museum. “Neanderthals are the most well-known among archaic human...

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;...

In a study of 2,266 workers in Finland, evening-type people, or night owls, were up to three times more likely to be treated for depression or anxiety than morning types, with poor work-life balance identified as a key contributing factor. Merikanto et al. showed that evening-types had more issues regarding work spillover to personal life and poor recovery from work and that these factors moderated...