Feb 3rd, 2026 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . E ver since he found a fossilized parrot mandible in 1983, Flinders University paleontologist Trevor Worthy has wondered about the backstory of fossils in Moa Eggshell Cave, North Island, New Zealand. The country is rife with fossil deposits dating to the Late Pleistocene, showing what lived in New Zealand when humans arrived about 750 years ago. Humans played a role in more than 50 species going extinct over just a few hundred years, but whether other provocations caused species turnover earlier in the Pleistocene has been unclear. Nautilus ... [Read More]

Feb 3rd, 2026 - There's no danger to us, and it could be a rare phenomenon. Around December 2032, the Moon might host a very violent guest. A 60-meter-wide asteroid known as 2024 YR4 currently has a 4.3% chance of slamming into the lunar surface. It sounds like small odds, but in the vastness of space, a 4% chance is pretty serious. It's high enough to demand our full attention, yet low enough to spark a massive debate: do we stop it, or do we watch? We can afford to treat this as a safe experiment. After months of observation, NASA has ruled out any danger to Earth. Follow-up observations, including ... [Read More]

Feb 2nd, 2026 - that The study comes from Alberto Donini, an engineer at the University of Bologna. His argument is centered around erosion. The pyramids were once covered in a smooth limestone casing, most of which was stripped away over the centuries and reused in Cairo. Donini compared erosion on stones that were once protected by this casing with erosion on stones that were exposed for longer periods, then ran the data through a statistical model. That model estimated a 68 percent chance that the Great Pyramid dates to between 9000 BCE and 37,000 BCE, with an average of around 23,000 BCE. All of those ... [Read More]

Feb 2nd, 2026 - In museum drawers, scientists found a tiny spider hosting a species no one had seen before. The juvenile spider sat in a glass vials, one of thousands tucked away in the archives of Brazil's Atlantic Forest collections. To the naked eye, it didn't look like much. Just another standard specimen. But under the lens, researchers spotted something eerie: a literal necklace of tiny, pearly spheres encircling the spider's waist. Researchers took a closer look at the necklace. These weren't decorations. They were vampires. Their discovery, described in the International Journal of Acarology , marks ... [Read More]

Feb 2nd, 2026 - Australian beaches are being colonized by an array of red stinging jellyfish , and the beachgoers have been warned. Thousands of lion's mane jellyfish have drifted into shallow waters and washed up on beaches across Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne, stretching from Altona in the west to Blairgowrie on the Mornington Peninsula, as per The Guardian . Neil Blake, the Port Phillip Baykeeper, revealed that a jellyfish invasion of that scale is quite unusual and rare and that the last comparable event happened about four years ago. This incident, dubbed "jellygeddon," followed the bloom of ... [Read More]

Feb 2nd, 2026 - Astronomers identified a strange object in the Milky Way that sends out powerful bursts of radio waves and X-rays with steady timing. The source, known as ASKAP J1832 0911, repeats its signals every 44 minutes, a rhythm unlike anything commonly observed before. What makes the finding stand out is not just the regularity, but the combination of energy involved. Data were collected from Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Australia, and were later combined by a team of astronomers. ASKAP J1832 0911 lies well inside the Milky Way, far ... [Read More]

Feb 2nd, 2026 - A growing body of research on dinosaurs' closest living relatives suggests the method that's been used to estimate how old a dinosaur was when it died may be leading paleontologists astray. JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Juana Summers. SCOTT DETROW, HOST: And I'm Scott Detrow, and we are considering dinosaurs. What do you get when a team of researchers walks onto a crocodile farm? Answer - a different way of thinking about the age of a dinosaur. Here's science reporter Ari Daniel. ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Until now, estimating how old a dinosaur was when it ... [Read More]

Feb 1st, 2026 - More than half a century after astronauts last left the lunar surface, NASA is preparing to send a crew of four back to the moon on a fly-by mission that will sling them around the far side. The mission is called Artemis II, and if all goes according to plan, it could launch as early as next week. When it does, the astronauts will climb aboard NASA's most powerful rocket and begin a journey that could take them farther into space than humans have ever been before. Like the missions that preceded Apollo 11, the first moon landing, Artemis II is a test flight, designed to test whether the ... [Read More]