In saliva, scientists have found hints that a “ghost” species of archaic humans may have contributed genetic material to ancestors of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa today. The research adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that sexual rendezvous between different archaic human species may not have been unusual.

While photographing Mars, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a cameo appearance of the tiny moon Phobos on its trek around the Red Planet. Hubble took 13 separate exposures over 22 minutes to create a time-lapse video showing the moon's orbital path.

People have scoffed that 3-D printers are simply toys themselves. But they probably didn't realize how much money is made off playthings. Do-it-yourself (DIY) manufacturing—making goods at home with a 3-D printer using open source designs from a free online repository—has a multimillion-dollar impact on the overall toy industry.

Humans have created 8.3 billion metric tons of plastics since large-scale production of the synthetic materials began in the early 1950s, and most of it now resides in landfills or the natural environment, according to a study published today in the journal Science Advances.

The University of Utah’s J. Marriott Library created an interactive, geospatial archive depicting the story of Utah radioactive fallout related to atmospheric nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site.

New biological information gleaned from the red vizcacha rat, a native species of Argentina, demonstrates how genomes can rapidly change in size. Researchers from McMaster University set out to study this particular species because its genome, or its complete set of DNA, is the largest of all mammals, and appears to have increased in size very rapidly.

Unmitigated climate change will make the United States poorer and more unequal, according to a new study published today in the journal Science. The poorest third of counties could sustain economic damages costing as much as 20 percent of their income if warming proceeds unabated. States in the South and lower Midwest, which tend to be poor and hot already, will lose the most, with economic opportunity traveling northward and westward. Colder and richer counties along the northern border and in the Rockies could benefit the most as health, agriculture and energy costs are projected to improve.

For surfers, finding the “sweet spot,” the most powerful part of the wave, is part of the thrill and the challenge.

Using VLBA telescope, astronomers have made the first detection of orbital motion in a pair of supermassive black holes in a galaxy some 750 million light-years from Earth.

In 2014, during a visit to a remote part of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, ornithologist Dr. Miguel A. Gómez Garza came across parrots with a completely different colour pattern from other known species. A study published today in the open-access journal PeerJ names these birds as a new species.

In the fruit fly, social isolation leads to sleep loss, which in turn leads to cellular stress and the activation of a defense mechanism called the unfolded protein response.

Different types of memories stored in the same neuron of the marine snail Aplysia can be selectively erased, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and McGill University and published today in Current Biology.

Astronomers combined the power of a “natural lens” in space with the capability of the Hubble Space Telescope to make a surprising discovery—the first example of a compact yet massive, fast-spinning, disk-shaped galaxy that stopped making stars only a few billion years after the big bang. Researchers say that finding such a galaxy so early in the history of the universe challenges the current understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve.

An analysis of stalagmite records from White Moon Cave in the Santa Cruz Mountains shows that 8200 years ago the California coast underwent 150 years of exceptionally wet and stormy weather. It is the first high resolution record of how the Holocene cold snap affected the California climate.

To make a star, the conditions inside interstellar gas clouds have to be "just right." When it comes to a cloud's magnetic fields, however, those conditions may range from powerful and orderly to weak and chaotic, according to new ALMA observations.

Wildfires are major polluters. Their plumes are three times as dense with aerosol-forming fine particles as previously believed. For the first time, researchers have flown an orchestra of modern instruments through brutishly turbulent wildfire plumes to measure emissions in real time. They have also exposed other never before measured toxins.

The arrangement of the photoreceptors in our eyes allows us to detect socially significant color variation better than other types of color vision, a team of researchers has found. Specifically, our color vision is superior at spotting “social signaling,” such as blushing or other facial color changes—even when compared to the type of color vision that we design for digital cameras and other photographic devices.

An international research team has uncovered 300,000 year-old fossil bones of Homo sapiens, a find that represents the oldest reliably dated fossil evidence of our species.

The cancer risk for a human mission to Mars has effectively doubled following a UNLV study predicting a dramatic increase in the disease for astronauts traveling to the red planet or on long-term missions outside the protection of Earth's magnetic field. New predictive model, published in Scientific Reports, shows radiation from cosmic rays extends from damaged to otherwise healthy 'bystander' cells.

Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study two "hot Jupiter" exoplanets--having virtually the same size and temperature, and orbiting around nearly identical stars at the same distance--hypothesized that the planets' atmospheres should be alike. But the researchers found that one planet's atmosphere was much cloudier than the other.