Science News: Recent scientific discoveries and expert analysis

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has made its first observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, revealing that the comet appears to be unusually rich in carbon dioxide.

In lab experiments, scientists are testing a new way to reshape the cornea and correct impaired vision, but the research faces many hurdles before it could be approved for use in humans.

Record-breaking images from the world's largest solar telescope, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, reveal a solar flare in unprecedented detail.

French photographer Emmanuel Tardy's image of a sloth clinging to a post in Costa Rica is one of the images from the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.

The ostentatious spikes of a newly described ankylosaur fossil suggest that its armor evolved via sexual selection.

Researchers injected "afterglow" phosphor particles into succulents to create the world's first multicolored glow-in-the-dark plants, featuring blue, green, red and blue-violet luminescence.

Small stone points discovered in Uzbekistan may be the earliest evidence of arrowhead technology.

SpaceX's Starship rocket has finally reversed its fortunes.

The hierarchical reasoning model (HRM) system is modeled on the way the human brain processes complex information, and it outperformed leading LLMs in a notoriously hard-to-beat benchmark.

A man who died 12,000 years ago in Vietnam had a "bonus" rib — and it was broken when he was shot by an exotic arrow.

A person in Maryland has been diagnosed with an infection of the flesh-eating New World screwworm. It's the first case in the U.S. in decades.

A new study shows that DNA forms coils under stress, not the tangled knots that scientists expected.

Scientists don't know much about the rare bumblebee catfish, native to the rivers of Brazil. One research team was lucky enough to observe thousands of them climbing to scale a waterfall, probably to find opportunities to mate.

Japan's first entirely homegrown quantum computer uses superconducting qubits and components made entirely domestically.

The near-Earth asteroid Bennu contains stardust that is older than the solar system and clues about its violent history, three new studies of the asteroid's sample materials show.

In a first, scientists in China transplanted a lung from a pig into a human so they could see how the host immune system handled the procedure.

A conceptual mission known as "Persephone" could explore Pluto and its moons for 50 years  — if it ever gets funded and approved.

Deep-field images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope revealed 300 unusually energetic early galaxy candidates, offering new insights into how the universe formed and evolved over 13 billion years ago.

Unlike solar panels, solar thermoelectric generators can convert heat from any source into electricity. But poor efficiency has held the technology back – until now.

Miniature models of the brain have revealed a "previously unappreciated" role of microglia, a type of cell found within the organ. The finding could help unpack how disorders such as autism arise.