A Maya calendar formula bears the name Sak Tahn Waax, the first known Classic Maya mathematician-astronomer directly credited for such work.

The brine-formed meteorite that crashed into a New Jersey roof in 2024 could teach us about how life first arrived on Earth.

In sci-fi, AI can navigate the unknowns and — ideally — keep human travelers safe. But it’s not intelligent enough to do that yet.

Clinical trial results show an experimental drug lowered tau levels in the brain and slowed some memory loss, but the data came with a surprise twist.

Atmospheric rivers bring heavy rain and floods, but if they don’t come around, it could mean drought. A new global map reveals little-known pathways.

The Euclid space telescope discovery could help researchers understand how black holes grew so massive so quickly in the early universe.

Researchers looking for the origins of left-right dominance in the brain found no innately better motor skills on either side.

Two “superpuff” planets orbiting a sunlike star over 1,000 light-years from Earth are as big as Jupiter and as dense as cotton candy.

New Horizons data reveal Pluto’s first six confirmed landslides along steep crater rims.

Proposed federal rules would rely on political appointees to decide how a lot of U.S. science gets done. History shows the consequences of such actions.

In her new book, science journalist Roberta Kwok takes readers behind the scenes to understand how researchers get nature to give up its secrets.

A boost to heat production and drawing in more oxygen may help Andean leaf-eared mice thrive at altitude.

The HER Salt Lake Contraceptive Initiative’s approach, which centered the user and made refills easy, meant all types of methods worked well.

Two studies of Neandertal remains suggest their newborns were about the same size as those of modern humans but developed faster through infancy.

Marine cloud brightening could cool part of the Pacific and weaken extreme El Niños, simulations suggest. But the approach could have risks.

There’s never been a good method to check for violations of the Outer Space Treaty’s prohibition of nuclear weapons in space.

The gold standard of scientific review, peer review by researchers’ colleagues, is in crisis. AI might offer a solution but has problems of its own.

The ambitious expedition aims to fill data gaps about the glacier-sea boundary to predict when the world might tip into a catastrophic climate regime.

A whole-genome analysis of Beefalo, a hybrid bison-cattle breed, suggests very few individuals have any bison DNA at all, a new study reports.

A majority of 8th-graders and roughly a third of 10th- and 12th-graders do not see great risk in using fentanyl once or twice, a study reports.