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Science News

Latest science news, discoveries and scientific developments.

These bacteria can change their diet to survive inside the body
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These bacteria can change their diet to survive inside the body

The human body fights staph infections by starving it of essential nutrients. Staph, it turns out, is remarkably good at changing what's on the menu. Staphylococcus aureus—the infamous agent behind MRSA and most staph infections—needs sulfur to build proteins and other materials essential for survival. In a new Michigan State University study, published in the Journal of Bacteriology, researchers found the bacterium can adjust its diet depending on what sources remain available.

📅 2026-09-09 20:50:01    •    Phys.org
Researchers chart new course for AI-powered biomedical discoveries
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Researchers chart new course for AI-powered biomedical discoveries

University of Missouri researchers are paving the way as artificial intelligence transforms biomedical research. A team from the College of Engineering and collaborators recently published one of the most comprehensive reviews to date of an emerging AI approach for biology known as flow matching. The work, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, provides scientists around the world with a roadmap for applying the technology to accelerate drug discovery, precision medicine and other biomedical advances.

📅 2026-09-09 20:40:05    •    Phys.org
Europe's forests are still standing, but many are losing the ability to recover
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Europe's forests are still standing, but many are losing the ability to recover

A forest can look intact from the roadside and still have lost much of its capacity to bounce back. That gap between appearance and function is at the center of a new policy brief published by eLTER, the European research infrastructure for long-term ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological research.

📅 2026-09-09 20:30:02    •    Phys.org
Electrochemical system extracts pure hydrogen from ammonia at substantially lower temperatures
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Electrochemical system extracts pure hydrogen from ammonia at substantially lower temperatures

As a liquid that is easily stored and transported, ammonia (NH3) is an attractive carrier for hydrogen, which is used in fuel cells, semiconductor manufacturing, chemical processing and other applications. However, breaking ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen typically requires high temperatures, and the resulting gas mixture must undergo additional purification before the hydrogen can be used in many applications.

📅 2026-09-09 20:00:12    •    Phys.org
Watch the first-ever footage of a rare deep-sea squid in the northeastern Pacific
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Watch the first-ever footage of a rare deep-sea squid in the northeastern Pacific

A bizarre squid has been filmed haunting the northeastern Pacific Ocean for the first time. Researchers spotted the bigfin squid (Magnapinna) via remote video while using an uncrewed submersible to explore underwater mountains, known as seamounts, at a depth of more than 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) off the coast of California. The footage, captured Aug. 7, represents the first confirmed live observation of a bigfin squid in the northeastern Pacific, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), whose scientists made the discovery with collaborators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).Olívia Soares Pereira, a deep-sea ecologist and postdoctoral ...

📅 2026-09-09 19:58:56    •    Live Science
'Why would you ruin your career?': OpenAI claims to have cracked one of math's greatest unsolved problems, but mathematicians allege it played dirty
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'Why would you ruin your career?': OpenAI claims to have cracked one of math's greatest unsolved problems, but mathematicians allege it played dirty

Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University, had just spent months working on what he believed could be a life-defining mathematical proof. Then, during a Sept. 6 meeting with OpenAI employees, he claims that he was issued a stark warning: "Why would you ruin your career?"That exchange, which Buckmaster described in a detailed public statement this week, sits at the heart of a ballooning controversy around a famous set of mathematical equations called Navier-Stokes. OpenAI says its artificial intelligence (AI) model has solved an outstanding problem tied to this 200-year-old set of fluid dynamics equations. The set of equations appears on the list of one of the seven Millenniu...

📅 2026-09-09 19:25:51    •    Live Science
Record-breaking rain in California was caused by abnormally high temperatures on the other side of the world, study finds
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Record-breaking rain in California was caused by abnormally high temperatures on the other side of the world, study finds

Abnormally high temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau triggered two catastrophic rainfall events halfway around the world in California and nearby states in early 2017 and 2023, a new study reports.This is the first time that researchers have identified this link, known as a climate teleconnection. The results could improve forecasts of extreme weather in the western U.S., which, in turn, could improve warnings for coastal communities and potentially save lives as well as billions of dollars in property damage, the study's authors say.In December 2016 and February 2023, the Tibetan Plateau was warmer than usual for these times of the year. Roughly one month after each of these hotspots appeare...

📅 2026-09-09 18:00:00    •    Live Science
World's oldest evidence of habitual drug use traced back 25,000 years to Indonesia
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World's oldest evidence of habitual drug use traced back 25,000 years to Indonesia

The world's oldest known habitual drug use can be traced to an island in Indonesia, where ice age hunter-gatherers sucked on betel nuts — palm seeds that contain a neuroactive substance, a new study finds. Scientists made the discovery after studying strange grooves in the teeth of two prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The deep grooves were caused by regularly sucking on betel nuts (Areca catechu), likely for relief from the pain of toothache, according to the study, which was published Wednesday (Sept. 9) in the journal Science Advances.The partial skeletons of the two people were found on the island of Sulawesi, but their lives were separated in time by thousands of years. One of them, a man w...

📅 2026-09-09 18:00:00    •    Live Science
See the highest-resolution footage of a black hole jet ever taken, thanks to AI and 27 years of observations
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See the highest-resolution footage of a black hole jet ever taken, thanks to AI and 27 years of observations

Astronomers just dropped a video 27 years in the making: the highest-definition animation of a gargantuan black hole jet blasting out of a distant galaxy and twisting off into space.The video, made from 116 images taken between 1995 and 2022, captured a blazar known as 3C 345, in the constellation Hercules. A blazar is a sort of quasar — a bright, feeding supermassive black hole embedded in the center of a faraway galaxy — that emits huge jets of gas into its environment. The jets blaze at nearly the speed of light and are charged with highly concentrated X-rays and gamma rays.As described in an Aug. 26 study in the journal Nature, scientists gathered the images of 3C 345 using decades of ob...

📅 2026-09-09 17:34:51    •    Live Science
The shingles vaccine may protect the heart
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The shingles vaccine may protect the heart

Shingrix, the same vaccine that protects people from the blistering shingles rash, might also lower risk of heart disease.

📅 2026-09-09 17:00:00    •    Science News
Do you think Al could ever become self-aware?
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Do you think Al could ever become self-aware?

Related storiesNext-generation AI 'swarms' will invade social media by mimicking human behavior and harassing real users, researchers warn'A dangerous proposition': How AI is warping the social fabric and the ways we collectively imagine the future'There's a sense that these algorithms are objective and they get to know you': How social media warps our understanding of healthcareArtificial intelligence (AI) systems can now hold conversations, reason through difficult mathematical equations, and respond in ways that seem more human. As AI grows more advanced, the question is shifting from the realm of science fiction to scientific debate. A recent preprint study examined "consciousness steeri...

📅 2026-09-09 15:28:32    •    Live Science
A 'wholistic' view of cellular communication across an entire animal
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A 'wholistic' view of cellular communication across an entire animal

It can't be heard, but different parts of the human body are in constant conversation, communicating to keep the entire system running efficiently. For biologists, being able to listen in on this discussion is a long-sought-after goal. Over the years, researchers have caught snippets of these exchanges, but the complete dialogue has remained out of reach.

📅 2026-09-09 15:00:15    •    Phys.org
Next-gen gravitational wave detectors could spot the first black holes
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Next-gen gravitational wave detectors could spot the first black holes

A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars ignited—literally the "let there be light" moment for the universe. Now known to astronomers as Population III, or Pop III, stars, these giants were very different from the stars we know today. They formed from pristine hydrogen and helium, with almost no "metal" (i.e., other elements) holding them back. They were also huge, growing to tens to hundreds of times larger than the sun. And they died young, in many cases collapsing into the universe's earliest black holes.

📅 2026-09-09 15:00:11    •    Phys.org