The mysterious objects spotted in the early Universe may not be isolated points of light after all. A new analysis of images of 217 ‘little red dots’ from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope suggests they sit inside remarkably compact, star-forming galaxies. Little red dots may reside in small galaxies with total masses equivalent to around one billion times that of the Sun. Image credit:...

Perseverance has caught the silhouette of Phobos, one of the two Martian moons, sweeping across the solar disk in a fresh transit video from Jezero crater. This image of Phobos in front of the Sun was captured by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z camera on August 12, 2026. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS / SSI. Phobos, the larger and innermost of Mars’ two moons, was discovered by the American...

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...

Using lasers, computer models and AI, researchers reconstructed the calls of 165-million-year-old relatives of modern crickets and katydids from fossilized wing fragments found in China; one of these fossil insects called at frequencies beyond human hearing, challenging the long-held assumption that bat predation was what pushed insects into the ultrasonic realm. “Very little is known about the...

For nearly 110 years, biologists have puzzled over why domestic cats’ kidneys are packed with unusually large numbers of fat-storing structures called lipid droplets. Professor Masao Miyazaki of Iwate University and colleagues suggest that these kidney droplets serve as a chemical reservoir, helping cats maintain a stable ‘scent signature’ in their urine even as the odor changes over time. Animals...

For decades, physicists have puzzled over a deceptively simple question: how does a proton carry its baryon number, the quantum property that marks it as matter rather than antimatter? According to a new paper by researchers with the STAR Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the baryon number appears to be carried not by the proton’s three quarks alone, but by the web of gluons...

Scientists have identified a decades-old chemical compound as a promising new candidate for treating obesity and related metabolic diseases. TOFA helps cells burn extra energy with no change in food intake or exercise. Image credit: Kravaivan11. Over the past five years, medications called GLP-1s have revolutionized the treatment of metabolic disorders like obesity, diabetes and fatty liver diseases. Sold...

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;...

An enduring debate in paleoanthropology asks what kind of foot the last common ancestor (LCA) of humans and chimpanzees had: one built like a modern ape’s for climbing straight up trees, or one built more like a generalized monkey’s, less suited to vertical climbing. In new research, paleoanthropologists from Dartmouth College and Ohio State University found that vertically-climbing monkeys called...