Science

Geology, paleontology, physics, space and the natural world

In Science, ECOnews reports on new discoveries in geology, paleontology, physics, space, health and the natural world. We explain the latest studies from universities and labs worldwide in plain language.

Color image of Mars's moon Phobos, the target of Japan's MMX mission, taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Japan’s MMX mission is set to launch October 19 to bring back the first sample from Mars’s moon Phobos, and a 55-pound rover named Idefix will touch down on the moon first

By Adrian Villellas

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October 19, 2026 at 7:31 AM

Artist's rendition of White Sands National Park during the last ice age, with mammoths, camels and shallow pools on the shrinking Lake Otero playa in New Mexico

In New Mexico’s White Sands National Park, footprints left beside mammoths date to 23,500 to 21,700 years ago, and pollen shows those walkers saw pine forest turn to pinyon and juniper within about 100 years

By Adrian Villellas

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October 18, 2026 at 7:14 PM

Ingmar Werneburg and Benedikt Kästle hold open a collection drawer with the new giant isopod species Bathynomus tuebingoborikensis among fossil crabs

A giant isopod brought from Puerto Rico in the 1980s sat in a University of Tübingen collection under the wrong name for decades, and a closer look shows the 12.7-inch crustacean is a new species

By Adrian Villellas

—

October 18, 2026 at 1:46 PM

Yellow and red ochre painting of a turtle with a patterned body on a rock shelter wall at Ubirr, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory

Awunbarna in western Arnhem Land holds 20 of the 52 known recent Rainbow Serpent rock paintings, one 20 feet long, and archaeologists argue artists painted them big as colonization upended their world

By Adrian Villellas

—

October 18, 2026 at 12:31 PM

KREPE-3 capsule with experimental heat shields floating inside the Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft

University of Kentucky students designed 12 small capsules to test experimental heat shields, including a 3D-printed one, and they left the ISS inside a cargo ship full of trash set to burn up on reentry

By ECONEWS

—

October 18, 2026 at 11:31 AM

Fossil skull of the hell chicken dinosaur Infernogallus jamesi, specimen ROM VP 65050, seen from the left side

A toothless hell chicken dinosaur from Montana’s Hell Creek Formation weighed about 26 pounds, and scientists think its jaw slid back and forth to mash soft fruit like a parrot’s

By Adrian Villellas

—

October 18, 2026 at 7:31 AM

5,000-year-old grave near Wrocław, Poland, with a green serpentinite battle ax under the man's right elbow and teeth from one of the two extra skulls above it

Archaeologists packing up a Roman-era cemetery near Wrocław, Poland, found a 5,000-year-old grave with a necklace of 42 drilled teeth and two extra skulls, and researchers want to know whether the heads were cut off

By ECONEWS

—

October 18, 2026 at 6:31 AM

View from the Ice Age base camp of Shég' Xdaltth'í' over the Tanana Flats in interior Alaska

On a ridge above Alaska’s Tanana River, archaeologists recovered more than 80,000 objects from a 13,800-year-old Ice Age base camp, and its diamond-shaped stone points match ones found in Siberia

By ECONEWS

—

October 17, 2026 at 8:01 PM

Oblique view of the new Moon crater McGetchin with bright debris rays, taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted a new Moon crater 728 feet wide that formed in spring 2024, a once-in-132-year event, and debris from that impact disturbed ground more than 62 miles away

By Adrian Villellas

—

October 17, 2026 at 6:31 PM

Ruins of the West House at Triangle Square in Akrotiri, Santorini, where a Bronze Age toilet survives on the upper floor

On Santorini, a Bronze Age toilet about 3,600 years old survives on the upper floor of Akrotiri’s West House, and its clay pipes once carried waste to a sewer beneath the town’s streets

By ECONEWS

—

October 17, 2026 at 12:31 PM

Ice flowing from the Transantarctic Mountains, where geologists link buried mountain roots to the Cambrian explosion

Around Antarctica, 1,712 zircon crystals drilled from the seafloor point to Himalayan-style mountains now buried under the ice, and two geologists say their erosion may have helped set the stage for the Cambrian explosion

By ECONEWS

—

October 17, 2026 at 8:46 AM

Artist's reconstruction of the new dinosaur species Invictibellatrix amberina with prey in its jaws on an Early Cretaceous floodplain on the Isle of Wight

London’s Natural History Museum kept a skull fragment bought in 1924 in a drawer for nearly 100 years, and it turns out to be a new dinosaur species, Europe’s first known megaraptoran

By Adrian Villellas

—

October 17, 2026 at 7:31 AM

Artist's concept of NASA's SR-1 Freedom nuclear-powered spacecraft cruising past Mars with its reactor at the end of a long truss

NASA wants to send a spacecraft equipped with a nuclear reactor and three helicopters to Mars to search for underground water, while also preparing future landing sites for humans

By ECONEWS

—

October 16, 2026 at 8:01 PM

Satellite view of the February 2021 winter storm covering most of the United States, the kind of event better weather forecasts weeks ahead aim to flag

On November 20, 2025, a Harvard student predicted an extreme cold snap for December, and weeks later, it struck precisely where one of the world’s best models had failed to predict it

By Adrian Villellas

—

October 16, 2026 at 1:46 PM

Artist's impression of the Hera spacecraft flying between the asteroid Didymos and its moon Dimorphos

ESA’s Hera spacecraft, flying at more than 26,800 mph, was scheduled to fire three thrusters for 93 minutes to brake toward the asteroids NASA’s DART hit in 2022, and a second burn follows October 22

By ECONEWS

—

October 16, 2026 at 11:31 AM

Global seafloor map from SWOT satellite data showing ocean floor features

A UFO hunter claims to have found an alien base 10 miles below the ocean’s surface, off the coast of South Australia, but NOAA explains why those giant lines may not actually exist

By ECONEWS

—

October 16, 2026 at 10:16 AM

Solar flares erupting from the Sun in May 2024, ahead of the next big solar storm

NOAA says the next big solar storm could reach Earth in as little as 15 to 18 hours and warns one as strong as May 2024’s G5 could cause a power blackout

By ECONEWS

—

October 16, 2026 at 6:31 AM

Archaeologists record wood imprints left in travertine at Abric Romaní, the site of Neanderthal wooden tools

An excavation in Barcelona has revealed that Neanderthals not only carved stone but also made spears, bark trays, and wooden structures as far back as 62,000 years ago

By Adrian Villellas

—

October 16, 2026 at 6:04 AM

Arsia Mons cloud stretching west from the volcano across Mars, seen by ESA's Mars Express

Mars’s Arsia Mons cloud stretches up to 1,100 miles from a 12-mile-high volcano every morning for months, and scientists think its ice forms without dust, a process never seen in a planetary atmosphere

By ECONEWS

—

October 15, 2026 at 8:01 PM

Bronze Age folding chair from Vamdrup, Denmark, on display

In a Danish burial mound in 1891, archaeologists found a 3,400-year-old Bronze Age folding chair, the only completely preserved chair from Bronze Age Europe, and its finder wondered if it was a table

By ECONEWS

—

October 15, 2026 at 4:58 PM

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Science

Japan’s MMX mission is set to launch October 19 to bring back the first sample from Mars’s moon Phobos, and a 55-pound rover named Idefix will touch down on the moon first

In New Mexico’s White Sands National Park, footprints left beside mammoths date to 23,500 to 21,700 years ago, and pollen shows those walkers saw pine forest turn to pinyon and juniper within about 100 years

A giant isopod brought from Puerto Rico in the 1980s sat in a University of Tübingen collection under the wrong name for decades, and a closer look shows the 12.7-inch crustacean is a new species

Awunbarna in western Arnhem Land holds 20 of the 52 known recent Rainbow Serpent rock paintings, one 20 feet long, and archaeologists argue artists painted them big as colonization upended their world

University of Kentucky students designed 12 small capsules to test experimental heat shields, including a 3D-printed one, and they left the ISS inside a cargo ship full of trash set to burn up on reentry

A toothless hell chicken dinosaur from Montana’s Hell Creek Formation weighed about 26 pounds, and scientists think its jaw slid back and forth to mash soft fruit like a parrot’s

Archaeologists packing up a Roman-era cemetery near Wrocław, Poland, found a 5,000-year-old grave with a necklace of 42 drilled teeth and two extra skulls, and researchers want to know whether the heads were cut off

On a ridge above Alaska’s Tanana River, archaeologists recovered more than 80,000 objects from a 13,800-year-old Ice Age base camp, and its diamond-shaped stone points match ones found in Siberia

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted a new Moon crater 728 feet wide that formed in spring 2024, a once-in-132-year event, and debris from that impact disturbed ground more than 62 miles away

On Santorini, a Bronze Age toilet about 3,600 years old survives on the upper floor of Akrotiri’s West House, and its clay pipes once carried waste to a sewer beneath the town’s streets

Around Antarctica, 1,712 zircon crystals drilled from the seafloor point to Himalayan-style mountains now buried under the ice, and two geologists say their erosion may have helped set the stage for the Cambrian explosion

London’s Natural History Museum kept a skull fragment bought in 1924 in a drawer for nearly 100 years, and it turns out to be a new dinosaur species, Europe’s first known megaraptoran

NASA wants to send a spacecraft equipped with a nuclear reactor and three helicopters to Mars to search for underground water, while also preparing future landing sites for humans

On November 20, 2025, a Harvard student predicted an extreme cold snap for December, and weeks later, it struck precisely where one of the world’s best models had failed to predict it

ESA’s Hera spacecraft, flying at more than 26,800 mph, was scheduled to fire three thrusters for 93 minutes to brake toward the asteroids NASA’s DART hit in 2022, and a second burn follows October 22

A UFO hunter claims to have found an alien base 10 miles below the ocean’s surface, off the coast of South Australia, but NOAA explains why those giant lines may not actually exist

NOAA says the next big solar storm could reach Earth in as little as 15 to 18 hours and warns one as strong as May 2024’s G5 could cause a power blackout

An excavation in Barcelona has revealed that Neanderthals not only carved stone but also made spears, bark trays, and wooden structures as far back as 62,000 years ago

Mars’s Arsia Mons cloud stretches up to 1,100 miles from a 12-mile-high volcano every morning for months, and scientists think its ice forms without dust, a process never seen in a planetary atmosphere

In a Danish burial mound in 1891, archaeologists found a 3,400-year-old Bronze Age folding chair, the only completely preserved chair from Bronze Age Europe, and its finder wondered if it was a table

In Romania’s Brașov County, brown bears number about 1,329 by a national genetic estimate, the highest density of any county, and one bear relocated from Poiana Brașov was back within 3 days

More than 40 Magellanic penguins born in captivity arrived by court order from Mar del Plata at a river island in Argentina’s Río Negro province, and at first they had not explored even a third of their new home

In Japan, researchers led by Tohoku University used an inexpensive blue pigment to turn carbon dioxide into methane with 79.5% Faradaic efficiency, and methane selectivity stayed above 60% for about 80 hours

At 8.2 feet on Oct. 13, the Lake Constance water level in Konstanz, Germany, fell below a 1947 record for the date, and it now sits 10 inches under last winter’s low

A simulated AMOC collapse in an unreviewed preprint cut wheat, corn and rice harvests in Germany and Ukraine by roughly 16 to 19 percent, and cereal prices could climb up to 40 percent in the worst case

A landslide in Alaska’s Tracy Arm fjord sent a tsunami 1,578 feet up the opposite wall, and a Science study found small tremors striking every 30 to 60 seconds in the hours before the collapse

A company won a mining license for a magnesium deposit it estimates at more than 50 million metric tons near Rășinari, in Romania’s Sibiu County, and the EU gets 97 percent of its magnesium from China

Leap seconds will end on May 20, 2027, under a rule the General Conference on Weights and Measures adopted in Versailles, France, and a new study finds Earth’s solid surface turning slightly rounder as polar ground rises

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