Science

Since conventional explanations have failed to pony up dark matter, one physicist is looking towards the unconventional. In a series of two papers, physicist Stefano Profumo of the University of California, Santa Cruz has proposed two strange, but not impossible, origins for the mystery material responsible for the excess gravitational effects we see out there in the Universe. In the …

The biggest and best of the summer’s string of meteor showers is now underway. The Perseids – known for bringing bright fireballs that arc across the sky – started in mid-July. The meteor shower is expected to be more visible as it continues to ramp up toward its peak, which will be Aug. 12 and Aug. 13. These “shooting stars” …

This week, the Sturgeon Moon rises, giving moongazers across the world the chance to see a beautiful full Moon skimming the horizon. The Sturgeon Moon is the August full Moon, the eighth full Moon of the year, and rises on 9 August at 21:13 BST. What’s more, the Sturgeon Moon marks the beginning of a lunar meeting with the Solar …

A vast blob of hot rock moving slowly beneath the Appalachian Mountains in the northeastern US is now thought to be the result of a divorce between Greenland and Canada some 80 million years ago. A study by an international team of researchers challenges the existing consensus in both geographical and chronological terms. It was previously thought the breaking up …

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The Tintina fault is thought to have been inactive for more than 40 million years, but new research suggests that earthquakes occurred in the zone much more recently. Researchers from the University of Victoria identified fault scarps that suggest major slips occurred during the Quaternary period (2.6 million years ago to …

For years, it has been one of the biggest mysteries in marine biology: What is killing the starfish? Since 2013, billions of sea stars, an elegant ocean species commonly known as starfish that are a key part of the environment along the coast of California and other states, have been dying. The animals have suffered from a disease that causes …

Diamonds aren’t always colorless; they can also be blue, yellow, green and even pink. But what makes these jewels come in varied hues? At their base, diamonds are made of a single element: carbon. “It’s just pure carbon,” forged into treasure under very high pressures, said Luc Doucet, a senior research fellow of geology at Curtin University in Australia. They …

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The earliest stars formed hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang by employing helium hydride ion reactions. | Credit: John Lund via Getty Images For the first time, researchers have recreated the universe’s first ever molecules by mimicking the conditions of …

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a camera on the end of its robotic arm, to view this wind-eroded rock shaped like a piece of coral on July 24, 2025, the 4,608th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Nicknamed “Paposo” by the rover’s science team, the rock was about 2 inches (5 centimeters) from …

Since its launch in late 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been glimpsing some of the earliest epochs of cosmic time. Its observations have stretched cosmologists’ timelines of when galaxies may have first started to form. And now some of the telescope’s farthest observations yet have revealed sources of blue ultraviolet light from an epoch when stars shouldn’t …