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The map of our solar system has changed. For most of history, we viewed our neighborhood as a tidy, organized place. We thought it was a simple system with eight planets orbiting a star, surrounded by a clean void. We assumed there was a clear finish line where the solar system stopped and "deep space" began. The Kuiper Belt proves that this model is wrong. The solar system does not have a hard edge. It does not just end. Instead, it fades away into the galaxy. What we once thought was empty space is actually a massive, chaotic frontier. It...

The first confirmed arm bone of a Denisovan has been discovered in southwest China, adding another piece to the puzzle of an elusive human relative... Only a handful of physical Denisovan remains have ever been knowingly recovered, including finger bones, ribs, teeth, jawbones, some skulls, and a couple of leg bones. But now, researchers in China report they have discovered the first Denisovan radius, one of the two long bones in the forearm... a site called Bianfu Cave that contains more than 60,000 bone fragments found in several layers of sediment... The vast majority of these skeletal remains belonged to...

How do math skills compare around the world?This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, ranks participating countries and economies by the average mathematics scores of 15-year-old students in the most recent PISA 2025 study, published in September 2026.PISA assesses students in mathematics, reading, and science. Its mathematics assessment goes beyond memorizing formulas or procedures, measuring whether students can apply mathematical knowledge and reasoning to real-world problems.More than 760,000 students took part in PISA 2025 across 91 countries and economies, representing roughly 33 million 15-year-olds worldwide.China in this ranking represents the participating jurisdictions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. Uzbekistan is...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal health advisers on Wednesday endorsed a blood test designed to spot signs of various cancers in apparently healthy people while warning that it’s far from clear how well the technology works. Grail Inc.’s Galleri test doesn’t diagnose cancer but instead, with a single blood draw, looks for a signal that someone may have one of a long list of tumors. Those who receive a positive result need additional care to tell if they’re really sick. The Food and Drug Administration’s advisory panel voted 7-2, with one abstention, that the DNA-based test offers more potential benefits than...

Explanation: The ghosts of five supernovas haunt this extraordinary image. It was acquired at Oukaïmeden Observatory in Morocco with approximately 200 hours of observations and shows a large patch of the sky, equivalent to the area of one thousand full moons tiled together, in the constellation of Auriga (the Charioteer). From left to right, the five supernova remnants visible across the field are G181.1+9.5, G182.4+4.3, G179.0+2.6, G180.0−1.7 (Sh2-240, the Spaghetti Nebula), and G178.2−4.2. They are highlighted in the annotated image, together with open cluster M37 and the Tadpole Nebula. As each explosion expanded into space, it created a growing shell...

Deep in the Sahara desert lie hundreds of phenomenal stone circles known as corbeilles. Dating back over 6,500 years, these monuments hold clues to prehistoric rituals, ancient cattle sacrifices, and the communities that once thrived in what is now barren desert. In this video, I dig deeper into the Messak Plateau, investigate what archaeologists found inside these stone structures, and uncover why they were potentially built. Now, the joke in archaeology is that when you don't know what a structure is, you just call it ritual. All right, stop. That's all. The 6,500-Year-Old Stone Circles of the Sahara | 10:17...

Why did the world's most powerful empire almost never use archers in battle? The Romans had access to bows. They trained archers. Yet they refused to make them central to their military strategy -- even as enemies surrounded them with arrows. It wasn't ignorance or cowardice. It was a deliberate choice rooted in Roman military philosophy, engineering, and culture. The Romans built their empire on heavy infantry, disciplined formations, and controlled violence. Archers -- with their unpredictability, distance, and dependence on open terrain -- threatened everything Rome's military system was designed to achieve. In this video, we uncover why the...

Fauci was kind enough (and stupid enough) to write his most intimate thoughts and feelings in a diary. He wrote this on a government-owned computer, making Fauci's inner musings the public's business. And the release of those more than 1,100 pages of his spectacularly narcissistic, self-congratulatory braggadocio will almost certainly have future historians asking one simple question: Why wasn't this guy in jail? It's been less than two months since that diary was made public, and researchers are still pulling astonishing nuggets of damning information out of it. Reason.com's Zach Weissmueller has taken a very deep dive into the diary's...

For years, we've been asking whether artificial intelligence can write like us, draw like us, code like us, or eventually replace us. Anthropic just gave us a more interesting question: Can AI notice something in nature that human scientists have been staring past?On Wednesday, Anthropic announced that its Claude AI had identified what researchers believe is previously unrecognized biological system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. The system contains a reverse transcriptase, a nearby partner gene, and a long array of repeating DNA sequences. Anthropic calls it ART, short for array-associated reverse transcriptases.From Anthropic:Today, we’re sharing...

Kent Weeks explores the tomb of Ramses the greats 100 children in the valley of the kings. Ancient Egypts Largest Tomb: KV5 (DOCUMENTARY) | 48:59 History Documentary Archives | 2.78K subscribers | 2,087 views | February 29, 2024

WASHINGTON – For most of Wednesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on protecting women's sports, not a single Democratic senator was in attendance. The only two Democrats to show up at all were ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. Both of them left within the first hour of the hearing and Klobuchar never spoke. The Democrats also did not host a single witness for the hearing. Durbin's devoted much of his opening testimony to dismissing the issue of trans athletes in women's sports, bringing up issues like affordability, getting cell phones out of the hands of...

Researchers have begun drilling into a mysterious, boat-shaped formation in the mountains of eastern Turkey, hoping an underground robot will unearth the answer to one of biblical history’s biggest mysteries. Members of the Noah’s Ark Scans expedition believe the Durupinar formation, located in eastern Turkey near Mount Ararat, could mark the final resting place of the vessel described in Genesis. “Good morning from the outer rims of Noah’s ark,” the project’s marketing and fundraising director, divisive Christian activist Lauren Witzke, wrote in a Tuesday update. “Core drilling has begun and the big bang evolutionists are already in damage control mode,”...

It was a rather dreary October afternoon in 2011 when I turned to my computer to watch a rough cut of Jefferson’s Secret Bible, a documentary for the Smithsonian cable television channel. I was the Under Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and the film was about the conservation of a precious artifact, a book known as the “Jefferson Bible” that would soon go on display at the National Museum of American History. After his retirement to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson had carefully cut out selected passages from Greek, Latin, French and English versions of the Bible, then pasted them in four...

Explanation: A once-in-a-lifetime crater has appeared on the Moon! A comet or asteroid roughly the size of a humpback whale (approximately 10-20 meters, 30-60 feet) crashed into the Moon sometime between April and May of 2024. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), with its monthly monitoring of the Moon, captured today’s images of the lunar surface before and after the event. The resulting crater, named after Apollo-era lunar scientist McGetchin, is two soccer fields across. Craters of this size are only expected once every 132 years! Follow up thermal imaging revealed a large cold spot that surrounds the warm crater. Surface...

Science is proving Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists wrongDawkins’ rejection of religion is waning while scientific discoveries are prompting fresh arguments for belief in GodTwenty years ago, Richard Dawkins published his international best-seller The God Delusion, thus establishing “New Atheism” as a major cultural force. Over the ensuing decade, other authors — such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss and Daniel Dennett — seized the popular imagination with their respective arguments about why belief in the divine is untenable.The physicists among them argued that the universe could be explained “from nothing”. The biologists argued that Darwinian explanations of...

BioRxiv The Preprint Server for Biology The DNA Legacy of Thomas Jefferson Posted September 21, 2026 Richard E. Green, Samuel H. Vohr, Joshua D Kapp, Jane E. Ailes, Samuel Sacco, Remy Nguyen, James Cahill, Peter D. Heintzman, Joanne Flores, Logan Kistler, Courtney A. Hofman, Robert C. Fleischer, Beth Shapiro, Richard Kurin doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.09.18.752809 This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. Abstract Allegations that Thomas Jefferson fathered the children of the enslaved Sally Hemings emerged in the context of U.S. presidential politics in the late 1700s and early 1800s and entailed...

Dementia research has reached a profound turning point. Alzheimer's disease was once considered 'untreatable', but that is not the universal rule any longer, according to this year's World Alzheimer Report. In the past five years alone, novel drugs have been shown to modestly slow decline in early Alzheimer's, while growing evidence suggests some dementia cases could potentially be delayed or prevented through risk reduction. Today, hundreds of clinical trials worldwide are now investigating possible medicines, new diagnostic options, and lifestyle interventions to identify, treat, or delay cognitive decline. The possibility of a cure is still far away, but it "feels...

A rare form of sudden and potentially permanent vision loss is becoming the latest safety question surrounding blockbuster GLP-1 drugs, with patients filing lawsuits in the U.S. even as regulators overseas have already added warnings. The condition is called nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION. It occurs when blood flow to the optic nerve is reduced, potentially causing abrupt vision loss that can be permanent.The complication appears to be extremely rare. The bigger issue is that researchers still disagree over whether drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy actually cause it.That uncertainty is now moving from medical journals into courtrooms...

This El Niño will have an epic tantrum. While still months away from reaching its peak, the super El Niño is already shattering temperature records. Data show that the sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific has reached 3.07°C (around 5.5 F) — tying the record set by the 2015–16 El Niño — with scientists expecting it to get a lot hotter. “This month (September) is very likely to have the highest monthly anomalies on record,” Zeke Hausfather, co-author of comprehensive climate change reports for the United Nations, told Phys.org in an email. Based on an analysis of 14 different...

Explanation: This shot captured an unexpected silhouette. Which is it? It isn't the sunspots, the small dark regions caused by concentrated magnetic fields visible around the Sun's bright disk. Sunspots typically last for weeks and were expected, since these spots were seen previously. It isn’t the International Space Station (ISS), the small dark structure on the middle left. This is because the featured picture was planned with sub-second timing to record the iconic structure passing before the Sun. It is the airplane. Just as this exposure was taking place in June, from Prasek in the Czech Republic, an airplane began...