The world’s largest solar telescope and advanced computer simulations revealed vortices that are reshaping our understanding of the Sun. Across the Sun’s visible surface, hot plasma is constantly rising, cooling, and sinking. At the edges of these churning regions, researchers have now resolved tiny swirling structures that may help explain how the Sun twists, stores, [...]

A 1.4-million-year-old trail of footprints reveals that a powerful human relative grew nearly as large as us and may have traveled in all-male groups. Eight individuals walked across the wet ground beside an ancient Kenyan lake. Within a short time, sediment buried their footprints and preserved a scene that would remain hidden for roughly 1.4 [...]

Researchers have uncovered a critical mechanism behind battery failure in solid-state batteries, offering new insights that could help unlock safer, longer-lasting energy storage technologies. Every time a smartphone is charged or an electric vehicle is plugged in, billions of lithium ions move through a battery to store energy. Future devices could perform far better with [...]

James Webb has revealed that the sunrise and sunset sides of WASP-121 b have surprisingly different atmospheres. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered striking differences between the morning and evening sides of the atmosphere of WASP-121 b, an ultra-hot gas giant located far beyond our solar system. The findings provide the [...]

Researchers discovered a closely orbiting pair of supermassive black holes in Markarian 501 by tracking two jets of particles. The binary system could merge within 100 years and may produce detectable gravitational waves. Current evidence indicates that nearly every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its center, with a mass ranging from millions [...]

A study suggests pigeons navigate using iron-rich immune cells in their livers that can respond to Earth’s magnetic field. The findings may solve a decades-old mystery about bird navigation and reveal a surprising new sensory role for the immune system. Pigeons are famous for their ability to travel long distances and still find their way [...]