"A bit like dinosaurs on Earth — they were enormous and primitive. And they had short lives, living for just a quarter of a million years."

The most powerful space telescope ever built and the car-size roving science lab on Mars are among 25 of the most iconic inventions the magazine has covered in the past quarter century.

“[In] any piece of beautiful mathematics, you almost always find that there is a physical system which actually mirrors the mathematics.”

Cephalopods—the class of animals that comprises octopuses and squids—are ubiquitous throughout the ocean, including in the deep sea. However, researchers still don't know very much about the distribution, diversity and behaviors of cephalopods in areas like t…

Once applied to building windows, the thin insulator could save houses a lot of energy in the future.

Scientists have discovered massive tunnels, but their origins are a mystery. These tunnels, not created by humans or geological processes.

Stricter climate policies would save hundreds of glaciers in Europe’s Alps and tens of thousands worldwide, study finds.

"This work shows without a doubt that Parker Solar Probe is diving deep with every orbit into the region where the solar wind is born."

A rare Australian fossil is turning evolutionary theories upside down—could this change everything we know about life on Earth?

Quantum technologies are systems that leverage quantum mechanical effects to perform computations, share information or perform other functions. These systems rely on quantum states, which need to be reliably transferred and protected against decoherence (i.e…

A new theory proposes that the universe’s fundamental forces and particle properties may arise from the geometry of hidden extra dimensions. These dimensions could twist and evolve over time, forming stable structures that generate mass and symmetry breaking …

All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA—and it likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation.

Astronomers from the University of Hawai'i (UH) at Manoa and elsewhere have observed the Taurus star-forming region, which resulted in the discovery of planetary-mass and stellar companions of two ultracool dwarf stars. The new finding was presented in a pape…

To develop more robust next-generation aerial explorers, NASA's Mars Exploration program is turning to drones.

Because they rely on hosts for a majority of functions, viruses aren’t considered alive. But entities like this one complicate matters.

Beneath the surface of the Moon, hidden deep within its crust, scientists have uncovered an ancient heat source that has been quietly emitting warmth for billions of years.

Almost a half-mile below the surface of Monterey Bay, California, scientists have recorded rare footage of a seven-arm octopus— only the fourth time the same research team has spotted the species in about four decades.

Starfish Space and Impulse Space have revealed the successful execution of the “Remora” mission, marking…

New climate data raises questions about how much the Earth has warmed

One of the oldest unsolved riddles in planetary science concerns the origin of the moon. Over a century ago, George Darwin proposed that tidal and centrifugal forces on a rapidly rotating proto-Earth caused the moon to be spun off into an Earth orbit.

What could force a supermassive black hole (SMBH) out of its host galaxy? They can have hundreds of millions, even billions of solar masses. What's powerful enough to dislodge one of these behemoths?

When astronauts next go to the moon, they'll find a little bit of home waiting for them.

An ultra-hot rocky exoplanet may be wrapped in a dense atmosphere, defying expectations about what small planets can sustain. Scientists working with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have found the clearest evidence so far that a rocky planet beyond our sola…

Ancient human DNA from Grotta della Monaca in reveals ancestry patterns, kinship-based burial practices, and evidence of a parent-offspring union in Bronze Age southern Italy.

There were huge disruptions to the global scientific enterprise this year — but immense bright spots for health, discovery, innovation and research collaboration.