Aug. 4, 2026 — Animal bones preserved in South Australia’s underwater caves reveal distinctive clues shaped by darkness, algae, bacteria, and other environmental conditions. The findings give scientists a powerful new way to reconstruct how ancient megafauna ...

Aug. 3, 2026 — Thawing Arctic permafrost is releasing ancient carbon into the ocean, raising fears that microbes could turn it into greenhouse gases and accelerate climate change. But sediment cores collected near ...

Aug. 3, 2026 — Scientists have figured out how two famously poisonous plants create chemicals with surprising medical potential. After tracking thousands of genes in wolfsbane and larkspur, they identified six enzymes needed to build a complex compound called ...

Aug. 2, 2026 — An AI analysis of 1.2 million satellite images shows that floating algae blooms are spreading across the global ocean. The rapid growth of massive seaweed mats could reshape marine habitats while bringing foul-smelling decay, ecological damage, and ...

July 29, 2026 — Songbirds appear to have evolved through rare explosions of change separated by long periods of slower development. Many of those bursts lined up with major climate shifts, suggesting that environmental upheaval can reshape life in powerful ...

July 29, 2026 — Bumblebees naturally have short lives, but extreme heat and human activity are making survival harder. Pesticides can poison bees or destroy the flowers they depend on, while habitat loss leaves them with fewer safe places to live and feed. ...

July 26, 2026 — Giant sequoias are built to withstand ordinary fires, but recent extreme wildfires killed thousands of trees that had survived for centuries or even millennia. A new analysis of about 26,400 sequoias found that trees in areas treated with prescribed ...

July 26, 2026 — A notorious snake invasion that devastated Guam’s native birds may have succeeded because the reptiles carried hidden genetic advantages. Using advanced long-read DNA sequencing, researchers uncovered more than 19,000 large genetic differences in ...

July 21, 2026 — Scientists studying decades of pygmy sperm whale strandings have uncovered three previously unknown types of Helicobacter bacteria hiding in the animals’ stomachs. All four infected whales showed ...

July 18, 2026 — A catastrophic asteroid breakup may have triggered a huge wave of impacts across the inner solar system about 800 million years ago. The debris was launched from near a gravitational gateway controlled by Jupiter, sending fragments toward Earth, the ...

July 17, 2026 — A major DNA study has rewritten the koala's evolutionary story, revealing that the species suffered a dramatic population collapse about 100,000 years ago, long before humans arrived in Australia. By calculating the koala's mutation rate for the ...

July 15, 2026 — An unusual leopard gecko that naturally develops aggressive tumors may become an important new model for cancer research. Scientists found its tumors share key genetic changes with human cancers, offering a rare opportunity to study the disease as ...