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Articles by Science News Today

Visible (color) and UV (grayscale) photos of three pitviper species exhibiting a wide range of UV reflectance. From top to bottom, the species are a prairie rattlesnake, a western diamondback rattlesnake and a two-striped forest pitviper (the green one). Even though all of these snakes are closely related species, they exhibit a wide range of UV reflectance. The white circle in each photo is a color standard used to measure UV and visible color reflectance in each photo; in the UV photos, the darker the snake appears, the less UV color it has. Credit: Hayley Crowell, John David Curlis, Hannah Weller, Alison Davis Rabowsky / University of Michigan

The Hidden Spectrum: How Snakes Use Ultraviolet Coloration to Survive and Thrive

Shark biologists now say a lemon shark, like this one, is a better model of the extinct megalodon's body than the great white shark. Credit: Albert Kok

Forget What You Thought You Knew About Megalodon: New Research Rewrites the Story of the Ocean’s Largest Predator

New Findings Illuminate Ancient Species and its Evolutionary Connections to Modern-Day Humans. Credit: Stephen Chester

Complete Skeleton Solves 140-Year-Old Mystery of Mixodectes pungens

Illustration of a black hole

The Mystery of Black Holes

An undated handout photo released by the University of Queensland shows an image of the boulder using 3D imaging and light filters showing the dinosaur footprints.

Dinosaur Footprints Discovered in Australian School After 20 Years

The dinosaur Plateosaurus lived in south-west Germany during the Triassic period. Credit: SMNS, M. Rech

New Study Reveals Triassic Terrestrial Life in Central Europe

This image provided by the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in March 2025, shows a fossil of the left midface of a hominin, right, between 1.1 million and 1.4 million years old, recovered from the Sima del Elefante site in Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain, and a mirrored simulation of the other side. Credit: Maria D. Guillén/IPHES-CERCA, Elena Santos/CENIEH via AP

1.4 Million-Year-Old Human Fossil Found in Atapuerca, Spain

Artistic reconstruction of the terrestrial ecological landscape before the end Permian mass extinction based on fossil palynomorphs, plants , and tetrapods recovered, as well as sedimentological data from the South Taodonggou Section. Credit: Yang Dinghua

Study Reveals Terrestrial Refugium in China During “Great Dying”

ATCA images of the G 11.2–0.3 region. The top left panel covers the whole 3 cm SNR, and the other panels show the zoomed-in images of the PWN at 3 cm (top right), 6 cm (bottom left), and 16 cm (bottom right), respectively. The white crosses indicate the position of PSR J1811-1925; the circles in the corners show the beam size in the maps; the color bars on the right are in units of Jy beam−1. Credit: arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2503.01802

New ATCA Observations Reveal Helical Magnetic Field in G11.2−0.3 Pulsar Wind Nebula

Spiral galaxies imaged by JWST that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way (red) and in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way (blue). The number of galaxies rotating in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way as observed from Earth is far higher. Credit: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2025). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staf292

James Webb Telescope Spots Unprecedented Galaxy Rotation Pattern

Visualization of very light neutron star, made by the explosion of a 9.9 solar mass star, is still surrounded by neutrino-heated material ejected from its hot surface region. The structure shown in the figure is about 250 km in diameter. Credit: Associate Professor Bernhard Müller

Simulations Suggest Companion Star in J0453+1559 is a Neutron Star

Visualization of the accretion process in SLX 1746–331, where matter from a companion star spirals into a rapidly spinning black hole.

Chinese Astronomers Study 2023 Outburst of Black Hole X-ray Binary SLX 1746–331

Internal conversion of a heterocyclic molecule via out-of-plane motion. Credit: Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57083-3

Unraveling Ultra-Fast Molecular Changes with X-ray Light and Coulomb Explosion Imaging

Quantum tornado in momentum space. Credit: Think-Design | Jochen Thamm

Quantum Tornado Discovered in Momentum Space

Generating multiphoton entanglement with a tiny metasurface. Credit: Peking University

Simplified Multiphoton Entanglement Generation Using Metasurfaces

Artist's impression of the center of the Centaurus Cluster. Blue shows a vast flow of hot gas, white shows galaxies, and reddish brown shows cool gas. Credit: JAXA

Discovery of Hot Gas Flows in the Centaurus Cluster

Molecular emission lines from mysterious icy objects captured by the ALMA telescope. The background image is an infrared composite color map, where 1.2-micron light is shown in cyan and 4.5-micron light is in red, based on infrared data from 2MASS and WISE. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), T. Shimonishi et al. (Niigata Univ.)

New Class of Interstellar Icy Objects Discovered

Coadded images of NGC 1514 at 7.7 µm (upper left), 12.8 µm (upper right), 25.5 µm (lower left), and a three-color composite image of the three. The origin (0′,0′) corresponds to the position of the central binary star. Credit: arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2502.21281

James Webb Telescope Reveals Enigmatic Rings of Planetary Nebula NGC 1514

Astronomers from the University of Arizona have made groundbreaking discoveries about the distant galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, observed by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy, nearly 300 million years old, reveals unexpected brightness and a complex chemical composition, offering a rare glimpse into the early universe's development. This image captures the intricate details of the galaxy, offering critical insights into the cosmos' formative stages.

New Study Suggests Lighter Dark Matter Could Explain Milky Way’s Central Mystery

This infrared image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope was taken by the onboard Near-Infrared Camera for the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, program. The NIRCam data was used to determine which galaxies to study further with spectroscopic observations. One such galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0 (shown in the pullout), was determined to be at a redshift of 14.3, making it the current record-holder for most distant known galaxy. This corresponds to a time less than 300 million years after the big bang. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Marcia Rieke (University of Arizona), Daniel Eisenstein (CfA), Phill Cargile (CfA)

Astronomers Discover a Surprisingly Mature Galaxy From the Universe’s Dawn

Orthogonal to sheet plane views of AA, AB1, AB2, and ABC stacking arrangements for graphyne. Only the AA and AB1 packing modes are consistent with the interplanar reaction of triple bonds to form polyacetylene chains in reacted graphyne. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2413194122

Synthesis and Characterization of Graphyne and Its Transformed Carbon Structure

Patryk A. Krakowiak et al, Co-option of mitochondrial nucleic acid–sensing pathways by HSV-1 UL12.5 for reactivation from latent infection, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2413965122

Study Reveals How Herpes Virus Uses Immune Response to Reactivate

The overview of the method. MindLLM is equipped with a subject-agnostic fMRI encoder and an off-the-shelf LLM. MindLLM is trained on multiple subjects with varying input shapes and an instruction-tuning dataset, aiming to encode different facets of semantic information in fMRI. After training, MindLLM is capable of various text decoding tasks. One application is that the decoded contents can be used to achieve neural control of existing systems that are not designed for it. Credit: arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2502.15786

Neuroscience-Informed AI Decodes Brain Signals with MindLLM

Major oxide geochemical analysis of ice and marine sediment core tephra shards analyzed that correlate with LCY ash. Credit: Communications Earth & Environment (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-025-02095-6

Los Chocoyos Supereruption: Global Cooling, Not Ice Age

Schematic of the ultra-high current, extreme beam generation experiment. Credit: arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2411.10413

Scientists Generate Highest-Current, Highest-Power Electron Beams

Credit: iStock

Genome Study Redraws Mollusk Evolutionary History

In a new study, scientists analyzed the nectar chemistry of several plants known to be used by mosquitoes for food in malaria-prone areas. They propose identifying and removing these plants from the landscape, such as from near people's homes, could tackle the number of infections of malaria as well as other tropical diseases like Zika, West Nile, and dengue. Credit: Anders Lindström

New Method Could Revolutionize the Fight Against Malaria and Other Mosquito-Borne Diseases

Left: Fitting pair of the grinding stone deposit of Sömmerda. Right: Fitting pair of the grinding stone deposit of Goseck circular enclosure. Credit: J. Soldevilla, LDA

Grinding Stones as Symbols of Women’s Lives in Neolithic Rituals

The experimental setup for studying doubly magic lead-208. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory. anl.gov/article/welcome-back-gretina.

Lead-208 Study Reveals Unexpected Prolate Deformation in Doubly Magic Nucleus

Sharma N, et al. Synovial joints were present in the common ancestor of jawed fish but lacking in jawless fish. PLOS Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002990

Synovial Joints Evolved in Ancient Jawed Fish, Study Finds