Jan 10th, 2026 - It's quick and easy to access Live Science Plus, simply enter your email below. We'll send you a confirmation and sign you up for our daily newsletter, keeping you up to date with the latest science news. Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Flipboard Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter A new category of space objects dubbed "platypus galaxies" is defying explanation. These nine strange cosmic objects, spotted in archival data from the James Webb Space Telescope , cannot easily be characterized by their features. They are small and ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - This article (originally published Aug. 13, 2025) has been updated to include new text and illustrations featured in the Jan. 2026 issue of . Using an artificial intelligence algorithm, astronomers have discovered a new type of supernova that likely results from the merging of a dying star and its black hole companion. In July 2023, the Zwicky Transient Facility detected supernova SN 2023zkd, located 730 million light-years from Earth. Six months later, in January 2024, an AI algorithm known as the Lightcurve Anomaly Identification and Similarity Search (LAISS) flagged the explosion as ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Earth's ancient nuclear reactors were a freakish natural accident Two billion years before we made history and split the atom, the Earth had already accomplished it and was running its own nuclear reactors. And they operated for hundreds of thousands of years, as the first signs of multicellular life emerged. In 1972, engineers at the Eurodif uranium processing plant in Pierrelatte, France, were inspecting uranium ore shipped from natural-resource-rich Gabon in western Africa, when they noticed something peculiar. The uranium-235 (U-235) content was lower than expected, and not just in some ... [Read More]

Jan 9th, 2026 - Follow Earth on Google Cloud-9 sits in a universe that rarely stops shining. Telescopes are built to chase that light and record every spark they can find. Yet some of the most important clues about how the universe works come from places that barely register at all. This object does not glow or glitter. It has no stars and almost no visible light. From a distance, it looks like nothing more than a quiet patch of gas. That absence is exactly what makes it useful. Cloud-9 offers a rare chance to study what happens when a galaxy never gets the chance to begin. Cloud-9 holds onto gas without ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - By From the ones with tap dancing feet to those that like to go off on adventures, penguins have a special place in popular culture. Though, we don't only love seeing them in animated flicks. We're just as fascinated seeing photos and videos of them in real life, or catching a glance of them at the zoo. Recently, people are amazed at a video of a penguin who looks like they belong in a movie. The @bbcearth TikTok gave audiences a glimpse at a penguin with a rare genetic mutation. It causes this penguin to be a stark white color, and as @bbcearth mentioned in the post caption, this is "one of ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - Researchers working on China's 'artificial sun' have reported breaking a long-accepted threshold that has limited the operation of nuclear-fusion reactors for decades. China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) is a nuclear-fusion research reactor in Hefei. Researchers hope that it will one day produce clean, nearly limitless energy by replicating the fusion processes that power the Sun. In fusion reactors, light-weight atoms are compressed under extreme pressure and heat to form heavier atoms. This process releases energy, but it must be optimized carefully so that the ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - When a baby smiles at you, it's almost impossible not to smile back. This spontaneous reaction to a facial expression is part of the back-and-forth that allows us to understand each other's emotions and mental states. Faces are so important to social communication that we've evolved specialized brain cells just to recognize them, as Rockefeller University's Winrich Freiwald has discovered. It's just one of a suite of groundbreaking findings the scientist has made in the past decade that have greatly advanced the neuroscience of face perception. Now he and his team in the Laboratory of Neural ... [Read More]

Jan 8th, 2026 - New research gives us the answer many have been long wondering. Astronomers have cataloged thousands of exoplanets, and a pattern keeps showing up: Around most stars, the most common planets are bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. They're often called super-Earths and sub-Neptunes , and dominate the statistics. But are these really the most common types of planets? Now, a new Nature study points to an answer by catching four planets at a stage most systems never show us: The awkward, oversized "baby" phase. The planets orbit a young Sun-like star called V1298 Tau , and the ... [Read More]