NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory re-entered Earth's atmosphere on Wednesday at 7:39 a.m. EST (12:39 p.m. UTC), over the North Sumatra region of Indonesia. The US Space Force confirmed it.
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Japan's space agency, JAXA, launched its Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) spacecraft on October 19 from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima prefecture. The mission is described as the world's first round-trip sample-return mission to Mars.
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Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night" most likely shows the sky before dawn on or around July 22, 1889, above Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. Art historians had placed the scene in June 1889, based on the artist's letters to his brother Theo.
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The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded Thursday to Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University along with Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for developing optogenetics, a technique that uses light to control the activity of individual neurons.
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Kiana Aran spent five days in total darkness inside a cave at the Ultimate Darkness Retreat in rural Wróblewo, Poland, in November 2024, tracking how her body responded to total sensory deprivation.
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Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology moved a 1-centimeter diamond using a quantum effect, according to a study published Thursday in Science Advances. The team, led by first author Anshuman Nayak and Professor Jason Twamley, used a 128-milligram diamond containing billions of nitrogen-vacancy centers.
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A Florida State University-led review of water chemistry research, led by Rob Spencer, appeared as the cover article in the September issue of Nature Water. The review examines how ultrahigh-resolution mass spectrometry can identify molecular fingerprints of human activity in rivers and other water systems around the world.
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A historian of science and author published "Querido Isaac, querido Albert" in 2023, a 76-chapter book built around scientific correspondence. The book argues that letters reveal the backstage of scientific work, and the author builds the case around three figures: Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein.
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An international research team that included Dr. Sebastian Pike of the University of Warwick and Dr. Dominik Kubicki of the University of Birmingham has identified previously unknown material structures by studying the fleeting intermediate stages of thermal decomposition, according to a study published in Nature Communications on Wednesday.
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Scientists are proposing that some planets could support life far better than Earth does, with conditions that stay favorable for billions of years longer than Earth's own habitable window allows.
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Researchers from Oxford, Durham, and Toronto have concluded that hydrogen occurring naturally underground, sometimes called "white hydrogen," could be abundant enough to meet the world's entire energy needs for 170,000 years.
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A bibliometric study published this year in the journal Biointerphases has mapped how research into the "protein corona" has split into two parallel tracks over the past quarter-century: a large, established body of experimental work and a smaller, newer wave built on computer simulation and machine learning.
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Francis Halzen has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work creating IceCube, the world's largest neutrino telescope, buried in the Antarctic ice.
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A physicist at Queen Mary University of London has found that the viscosity of blood sits close to a value predicted from basic physical constants, despite blood being a far more complicated fluid than the simple liquids such calculations usually describe.
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In 1933, the physicist CV Raman turned away a job applicant named Kamala Bhagvat because she was a woman. She was eventually admitted to the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru anyway, and went on to work at Cambridge with the biochemist Robin Hill.
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Mary Tsingou Menzel, a mathematician whose programming work helped found modern chaos theory but went unacknowledged for half a century, died in August at her Los Angeles home. She was 97.
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A survey released Monday by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology found that scientific interest and knowledge in Spain continue to grow, extending a recovery from a dip recorded during the pandemic in 2020.
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A study published Sunday found that 2024 saw a record-breaking number of heavy and extreme rainfall events worldwide, driven by an unusual ocean pattern that researchers warn could become the norm by 2050.
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Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, an Indian physicist, discovered that light changes wavelength when it scatters through transparent substances, a finding that revealed details of molecular structure and became known as the Raman effect.
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Archaeologists are reconstructing a 2,000-year-old Celtic coin hoard that was scattered across a field by plowing, piecing together the find as part of a roundup of five science stories a newsletter published for the week of October 3-9.
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