Europa and Enceladus show why the search for life cannot follow sunlight alone: orbital resonances keep gravity flexing their interiors and help preserve oceans beneath the ice.
High-pressure experiments show that bridgmanite retained more water at magma-ocean temperatures than expected, but the ocean-sized figure is a wide modelled range.
The mammoth's final hours may still be written in its cells, frozen in time before decay could erase the molecular record of what killed him.
A shark's final days revealed an unexpected predator—and raised urgent questions about what hunts the ocean's apex carnivores.
Wolves have long been portrayed as apex hunters of land and sea, but this is the first evidence of one deliberately harvesting human fishing gear—suggesting these predators are far more adaptable than we realized.
Eye-lens chemistry and 19th-century weapons embedded in harvested whales reveal a mammal whose lifespan can extend beyond two centuries.
The first published shelling records from eastern Australia suggest dolphins reinvented a rare tool-using tactic already known from Shark Bay, then began passing it on locally.
The axolotl rebuilds limbs, heart tissue, spinal cord and parts of its brain without scarring — yet the wild population survives only in the canals of Xochimilco, where fewer than a thousand adults remain.
A blue whale's heart weighs 400 pounds, slows to two beats a minute on deep dives, and pushes blood through an aorta the width of a dinner plate. The first specimen ever fully preserved rewrote nearly everything textbooks claimed about its size.
Blood Falls, the rust-red outflow at the terminus of Antarctica's Taylor Glacier, is fed by a briny reservoir sealed under the ice for at least a million years. A new Nature Geoscience study finds an active community of marine-associated microbes still living inside it, without sunlight or oxygen.
The water crisis hidden in your closet begins thousands of kilometres away, in drought-stricken river basins where cotton farmers drain aquifers to grow the shirt on your back.
Byrd Glacier drains an East Antarctic catchment larger than California through a 24-kilometre gap in the Transantarctic Mountains, moving at up to 800 metres a year — and its behaviour is set by a bedrock trough carved before the dinosaurs.
A Great Basin bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains, sampled by researcher Tom Harlan, germinated around 3050 BCE — five centuries before the Great Pyramid was built — and is still alive today. Its exact location is a Forest Service secret.
A 4.5-millimetre jellyfish off the coast of Japan responds to injury or starvation by collapsing into a blob and regrowing as a juvenile polyp — with no known upper limit on how many times it can reset its own life cycle.
A tributary in the Peruvian Amazon reaches 86 degrees Celsius along a six-kilometre stretch, with no volcano within 700 kilometres. Geologists trace the heat to rainwater circulating kilometres deep through faults before rising back to the surface.
Cassini established that Enceladus may be habitable, but a scientifically useful failure to find life would require repeated, complementary measurements designed to make a false negative unlikely.
