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Articles by Science News Today

Male guppies have an extraordinary diversity of colors. Credit: Wouter van der Bijl

Why Guppies’ Orange Colors Could Be a Sign of Their Virility

A scanning electron microscope micrograph depicting a mass of Yersinia pestis bacteria in the foregut of an infected flea. Credit: Wikipedia

Ancient DNA Reveals 6,500-Year-Old Secrets of Zoonotic Diseases and Their Impact on Humanity

Caligula. Copenhagen, New Carlsberg Glyptotek. Credit: Sergey Sosnovskiy CC BY-SA 2.0

Caligula’s Cruelty Wasn’t His Only Legacy He Was Also a Medicinal Plant Expert

$The refitting of Sc1982-345-25 and Sc1986-1278-160 allows for the reconstruction of a diaphysis fragment of a left tibia (A,B). The bifacial reshaping observed on the distal part (C,D) presents a polish (F) that occurred prior to the breakage of the bone as it is present on both side of the fracture. Combined with blow fractures observed on the proximal part (A,B), these are all indicators supporting the multifunctional use of this tibial fragment as an intermediate tool as suggested in the drawing by S. Lambermont (E), before the different fragments were used separately as retouchers as illustrated in Figs. 3A,B Credit: Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-08588-w$

Neanderthals Turned Cave Lion Bones Into Tools More Than 130,000 Years Ago

α-enhancement level vs. iron abundance from APOGEE DR17 for stars with 1.5 < log g < 3. KIC 10001167 is highlighted. Credit: Astronomy & Astrophysics (2025). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202453347

Ancient Star Reveals Secrets About the Milky Way’s Birth

Portable optical clocks and trial route. Credit: Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-61140-2

Quantum Clocks Ride the Waves and Leave GPS Behind

An artist's impression of the proposed VERVE mission to Venus the answer whether tiny bacterial lifeforms really do exist in the planet's clouds. Credit: Danielle Futselaar

Venus Clouds May Hide Alien Life Waiting to Be Found

This artwork depicts a triple-star system in which two of the stars are locked in a tight gravitational orbit. The bright star in the foreground on the right is a white dwarf, which is stealing mass from its stellar companion. Eventually, this building up of mass on the white dwarf will trigger periodic explosions. Together, the two stars form an object called cataclysmic variable. Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

The Hidden Third Stars That Forge Explosive Stellar Love Stories

Upper panel: Weekly binned gamma-ray light curve of S5 0716+714. Bottom panel: combined long-term V-band light curve. Credit: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2025). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staf1019

When a Cosmic Lighthouse Grows Quiet Blazar S5 0716+714 Surprises Astronomers

The newly discovered exoplanet HD 135344 Ab can be seen as a yellow dot on the right side of the image. It was measured in 2019 (2x), 2021, and 2022. The empty purple circle with the star in the middle indicates the location of the corresponding star. This star was filtered out, first by a coronograph and further by digital post-processing. The dashed line represents the planet's orbit. Credit: Stolker et al.

Hidden Giant Found Orbiting a Star That Should Have Stopped Making Planets

Total solar eclipse as viewed from Earth in 2023. Credit: Miloslav Druckmuller, Shadia Habbal, Pavel Starha

A Tiny Satellite Plans to Chase Eternal Eclipses to Unlock the Sun’s Secrets

An artist's impression of the UK-led CosmoCube spacecraft, which would orbit be tasked with listening out for an "ancient whisper" from the early universe on the far side of the moon. Credit: Nicolo Bernardini (SSTL Ltd) & Kaan Artuc (University of Cambridge)

Scientists Are Sending a Spacecraft to Listen to the Whisper of the Early Universe

Bone worms (the red animals in this picture) were first discovered in the early 2000s, but these animals are believed to have evolved more than 100 million years ago. Adapted from Fujiwara et al. via Zookeys, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Bone-Eating Worms That Dined on Dinosaurs Still Feast Beneath the Sea

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The Secret Cells That Let Pythons Devour Bones Without a Trace

Woman Blowing Candles on Cake on Her Birthday Party Celebration

Your Brain Might Be Older Than You Think and It Could Decide How Long You Live

a) Schematic of the genetic engineering strategy for the generation of the ChuA reporter strain used in this study. Credit: BioRxiv (2024). DOI: 10.1101/2024.12.05.626953

AI Designs a Superbug Killer in Seconds and Signals a New Era of Medicine

(a) Two-component Bragg spectroscopy setup. The resulting (b) Id = I+ + I− and (c) Is = I+ − I− in the (x,z) plane oscillate harmonically along z, with different frequencies respectively corresponding to Ωd(kp) and Ωs(kp). (d) Contrasts of the density and (e) spin fringes as a function of kp computed numerically at the cell output (z = L), of which we spot the extrema. The dotted black curves are the theoretical expectations. (f) Reconstruction of the density and (g) spin dispersions from the extrema of contrast. Fitting data points with the Bogoliubov relation (full blue in (f) and orange curves in (g)) gives the expected values of ∆nd,s. Credit: Physical Review Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1103/s58b-3mmx

Scientists Discover Light Can Ripple and Flow Like a Frictionless River

Portrait od handsome man in studio on dark background

Why Some People Never Seem to Forget Anything

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The Brain’s Hidden Superpower You’re Probably Ignoring

People letting go of fears, sadness, grief and pain concept.

What Anxiety Is Trying to Tell You—And How to Listen

Sunflowers. Credit: iStock

These Plants Know What Time It Is—Without a Clock

Panicum maximum. Credit: iStock

Meet the Grass That Can Kill a Lion

Crispy Organic Unhealthy Bacon on a Background

Even Moderation Can’t Protect You From the Hidden Dangers of Processed Foods

Climate Change Across Seasons Experiment (CCASE) plot during spring snowmelt (11x13.5 meters in size; growing season warmed plus winter soil freeze/thaw plot). Credit: Pamela Templer

Warmer Winters Could Diminish Forests’ Power to Fight Climate Change

3D models of Homo sapiens (top two images) and Homo neanderthalensis (bottom two images) crania for visual comparison. The human model was created from DICOM files of an anonymized volunteer patient from the Manchester Centre for Clinical Neurosciences. The Neanderthal model is based on La Ferrassie 1 and was created by LB and TR. Credit: Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health (2025). DOI: 10.1093/emph/eoaf009

The Hidden Legacy of Neanderthals: Could Ancient DNA Be Causing Modern Headaches?

The robust skull of an extinct Chirodipterus australis lungfish. Credit: John Long, Flinders University

Ancient Fish Jaws Reveal Secrets of How Life Crawled Onto Land

Marae with ahu (a central stone platform) on Mo’orea, Windward. Credit: Antiquity

Mysteries of the Moai: New Evidence Shows Easter Island Was Never Truly Alone

These images, showing ejecta around the impacted near-Earth asteroids, were taken during the approach (with Didymos to the upper left) and departure (Didymos to the upper right) of DART's companion spacecraft, LICIACube, which flew past a few minutes after the impact and imaged the aftermath. The ejecta field consists of an asymmetric cone of dust that exhibits streamers and filaments, as well as over a hundred meter-sized boulders that were ejected in preferred directions. Credit: NASA DART team and LICIACube.

NASA’s Asteroid Strike Unleashes a Surprise Storm of Space Boulders

Images of the sample obtained using a scanning electron microscope. These are backscattered electron images, and the different shades of grey highlight different chemical compositions of the minerals making up the rock. Credit: University of Manchester

Moon Rock Found in Africa Unlocks Secrets of Lost Lunar Volcanoes

This artist's illustration shows the Giant Impact that created the moon. When the protoplanet Theia struck Earth more than 4 billion years ago, it may have delivered important chemicals to Earth that enabled life to appear. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

The Cosmic Chaos That Made Earth the Only Habitable Planet