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Articles by Science News Today

Credit: bioRxiv (2025). DOI: 10.1101/2025.01.13.632719

Scientists Discover a Way to Reactivate Dormant Genes to Treat Genetic Disorders

Image shows the vaccine antigen (pink) being concentrated in a germinal center (yellow) within B cell follicles (cyan), triggered by the researchers’ combination adjuvant vaccine. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Scientists Discover Long-Lasting Immune Boost with Two-Ingredient HIV Vaccine

Artificial action values create body-part centered fields, which resemble biological peripersonal neurons. a, When objects offer rewards upon contact, agents maximize value by moving toward positive-reward objects (apple) and away from negative-reward objects (wasp). b, Motor repertoire shapes body-part-centered fields. c, An artificial neural network trained on simultaneous interception and avoidance tasks naturally adopts a modular structure, beneficial for use in an egocentric map (left, network graph). d, More subnetwork structure results in better task performance. Credit: Bufacchi et al

Scientists Discover How the Brain Maps the Space Just Beyond Your Skin

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CT Scans Alone Cannot Confirm Brain Death According to New Study

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How a Dark Personality Trait May Protect Against Depression

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Childhood Trauma Leaves Lasting Footprints on the Brain

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Scientists Discover Porn Can Alter Brain Function and Emotion

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How Hormones Quietly Shift the Female Brain’s Focus During the Menstrual Cycle

Credit: James Cook University

Sharks Follow a 100-Year-Old Math Law Almost Perfectly

Superposed AlphaFold-predicted models of the three proteins 371 inside (left) and extracellular (middle) views with the transmembrane helices labeled and central 372 binding site cavity shown as a gray surface. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2425364122

Scientists Finally Discover How a Mysterious Micronutrient Enters Human Cells

Pentaploid Rosa canina’s flower reveals its unique sexual reproduction: asymmetric meiosis maintains pentaploidy - a rare strategy among eukaryotes. Credit: André Marques

Scientists Discover How a Simple Rose Outsmarts Genetics

Scientists successfully synthesize neutral hexanitrogen (N6). Credit: Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09032-9

Scientists Create Explosive New Form of Nitrogen That Could Power the Future

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Scientists Warn Carbon Budget for 1.5°C Warming May Vanish in Just Three Years

Tomographic images of the Dani plume. Credit: Earth and Planetary Science Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2025.119467

Ghost Plume Found Deep Beneath Oman Signals Hidden Force Beneath Earth

On a kagome lattice charge carriers become immobilized due to quantum mechanical effects, which was utilized by the team of Andrej Pustogow at TU Wien to optimize thermoelectric performance. Credit: TU Wien

This Metal Turns Heat Into Electricity Using a Secret Hidden in Its Atomic Pattern

Footprints found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, providing the earliest evidence of human activity in the Americas. Credit: Cornell University

Scientists Uncover 23,000-Year-Old Human Footprints in the American Southwest

An SwRI-led team compared the early impact history of Venus and Earth, determining that Venus experienced higher-energy impacts that created a superheated core. Models show these conditions could create Venus's extended volcanism and younger surface. Credit: Southwest Research Institute

The Violent Origins of Earth’s Atmosphere and Life

Time variations of the oxygen (O2) content and the VGADM in the past 540 million years. Credit: Sci. Adv. (2025). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adu8826

Earth’s Magnetic Field and Oxygen Levels Moved Together for 540 Million Years

This illustrations shows Scholz's star, a binary star that performed a stellar flyby of our solar system about 70,000 years ago. The sun is the small star in the upper left. There have been many stellar flybys in our solar system's history, and researchers wonder if they could've triggered dramatic shifts in Earth's paleoclimate. Credit: Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester

Wandering Stars Did Not Alter Earth’s Climate After All

Habitability of sun-like versus red dwarf stars. Credit: NASA

Alien Life Could Be Hiding in Places We Never Thought to Look

This enhanced-color image of Mercury reveals the planet’s complex surface geology. Captured during MESSENGER’s primary mission, the colors highlight differences in rock composition and texture that aren’t visible to the human eye. Light blues and whites trace fresh crater rays, dark blues mark low-reflectance material likely rich in opaque minerals, and tan areas show ancient lava plains—clues to a volcanic past scientists are still working to decode. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Science

Why the Smallest Planet May Hold the Biggest Secrets of the Solar System

Photometric data and fitted light curve of the event AT2021uey. Credit: Astronomy & Astrophysics (2025). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202554236

Scientists Discover Rare Alien World in the Galactic Wilderness

A detailed, thousand-color image of the Sculptor Galaxy captured with the MUSE instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). Regions of pink light are spread throughout this whole galactic snapshot, which come from ionized hydrogen in star-forming regions. These areas have been overlaid on a map of already formed stars in Sculptor to create the mix of pinks and blues seen here. Credit: ESO/E. Congiu et al.

Astronomers Capture the Most Detailed Thousand Color Image of a Nearby Galaxy

The globular cluster NGC 5634 imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA.

Ancient Star Cluster NGC 5634 May Not Belong to the Sagittarius Galaxy After All, New Study Finds

Example of MF and ES muscle (a) ROI definition and (b) 3D volume computation. Credit: Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-00210-3

Water Therapy Brings Relief to Chronic Back Pain Sufferers

Ventral striatum projecting BLA neurons arise from the BA and are comprised of Drd1+ and Drd2+ neurons. Credit: Molecular Psychiatry (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41380-025-03075-0

What Happens in Your Brain When a Smell Turns Your Stomach

Graphical abstract Credit: JCI Insight (2025). DOI: 10.1172/jci.insight.188281

Scientists Discover Cancer-Like Cell Behavior in Heart Disease

LAN exert depression-inducing effects in tree shrews via a pHb-related visual pathway. Credit: MENG Jianjun

How Nighttime Light Could Be Quietly Changing Your Mood

A man hiking along a country road in the English countryside.

Walking Over 100 Minutes a Day May Shield You from Chronic Back Pain

The paths of individual bacterial cells swimming (blue-slow, turquoise faster) within channels between 10 micrometer high topological features (outlined in yellow). Credit: University of Nottingham

Scientists Discover How to Outsmart Bacteria Without Antibiotics