A plague of moths weakened Siberia's forests so thoroughly that wildfires now spread with catastrophic speed, revealing how climate cascades can turn a region into kindling.
Moscow is banking on lunar nuclear power despite a recent crash landing, betting its credibility on technology it hasn't successfully tested on the Moon in nearly fifty years.
A vanished lineage of marsupials ruled Australian rainforests for 35 million years, leaving behind only scattered teeth and jaw fragments—and no living descendants to tell their story.
A fossil tooth socket in a Caribbean cave reveals an unexpected architect: bees that nested inside animal bone for millennia, a behavior never before documented in the paleontological record.
A monument to propaganda so elaborate that even its creators may have stopped believing anyone would move there.
The flare is the first tidal disruption event an optical sky survey has caught in the outskirts of a galaxy rather than at its center. What kind of black hole made it remains an open question with two live answers.
The aerospace agency's first wind tunnel since the 1980s will test the next generation of aircraft and spacecraft—but only after years of delays and budget overruns that nearly derailed the project entirely.
A vivid memory should feel recent. Six online experiments found the reverse for anything repeated: the objects people had seen over and over were the ones they placed deepest in the past.
A record-breaking temperature has stood for over a century, but the scientists who know it best think it probably never happened.
After twenty years of drilling through Soviet rock, scientists had barely scratched the surface—the planet's interior remained as unreachable as the stars.
The question haunting postwar planners was not whether Japan could recover, but whether it would starve before it had the chance.
A single Australian telescope holds humanity's only conversation with a spacecraft that left Neptune decades ago—until Earth's repair needs force an impossible silence.
The world's most abundant building material is running scarce in the places that need it most.
A single human fingerprint contains 300 times more organic material than Mars's most precious cargo is allowed to carry—and NASA's engineers had to invent new ways to keep these tubes pristine enough to preserve signs of ancient microbial life.
The eclipse that darkens Iceland and Spain gives American observers a notch out of the Sun, in the morning in Alaska and around midday farther east. The better event arrives after midnight.
Researchers in Uttarakhand described a new spider, Theridion himalayana, carrying the red-and-black smile that made Hawaii's happy-face spider famous. A gene barcode sets it about 8.5 percent apart from the Hawaiian species, enough to call it its own lineage. Whether the two arrived at the same face by chance or inherited it from a shared ancestor is the question the discovery leaves open.
