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Science news this week: The world's oldest rock art, giant freshwater reservoir found off the East Coast, and the biggest solar radiation storm in decades
Jan. 24, 2026: Our weekly roundup of the latest science in the news, as well as a few fascinating articles to keep you entertained over the weekend.
In this week's science news, we covered the world's oldest rock art, a gigantic reservoir found beneath the East Coast seafloor, a record solar radiation storm, and how the JWST's black hole discoveries are upending cosmology as we know it.
(Image credit: Maxime Aubert | Chi Shiyong/VCG via Getty Images)
This week's science news was filled with discoveries once thought lost to time — notably, the world's oldest known rock art was discovered in Indonesia.
The roughly 70,000-year-old stencil of a human hand, found in a cave in Sulawesi, promises to fill a major gap in scientists' understanding of humanity's migration across the islands of Southeast Asia to Australia, and was likely left by an ancestor of Indigenous Australians.
And it wasn't just ancient Homo sapiens who were found to have made intrepid and unexpected journeys this week, as a 2.6 million-year-old fossil jaw of the extinct human relative Paranthropus (or "Nutcracker Man") was found hundreds of miles farther north than previously thought possible.
An expedition off the coast of Massachusetts confirmed this week the existence of a giant sub-seafloor reservoir that could supply a city the size of New York City with fresh water for around 800 years.
The freshwater reservoir stretches from offshore New Jersey as far north as Maine and possibly formed 20,000 years ago during the last ice age, when rainwater became trapped underground before sea levels rose.
More definitive results about how and when the reservoir took shape, alongside its bacterial and mineral contents, are expected soon. The scientists who found it say the information could prove vital to those who may want to tap into it in the future.
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It's a truism that we often miss what's right under our noses, but what about our noses themselves? How is it that we go through life ignoring the fleshy prows perched right on our faces, only seeing them with a conscious effort? The answer isn't because they're out of our sight but instead because of an ingenious neurovisual sleight of hand that may be key to our survival.
Earth's most powerful solar radiation storm in more than two decades hit Monday (Jan. 19), sending curtains of auroras across night skies as far south as Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico.
While some publications reported that the storm was the largest geomagnetic storm since 2003, that was a slight exaggeration; 2024's "Mother's Day storm" was more powerful. However, the latest storm was one of the most powerful solar radiation storms on record — meaning the sheer quantity of radiation hurled at Earth was extraordinary.
Not long ago, astronomers thought they knew the story of how gigantic supermassive black holes formed. They believed it happened the same way regular black holes are born: by collapsing from large stars and slowly merging until they grow to billions of times the sun's mass.
But the James Webb Space Telescope appears to have upended that story by finding enormous black holes in the earliest epochs of our universe that shouldn't have had the time to grow by merging or devouring matter.
So how did these behemoths get so enormous? Live Science investigated the explanations — and all of their revolutionary potential — in this fascinating Science Spotlight.
Something for the weekend
If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the analyses, crosswords and opinion stories published this week.
This week saw the release of a stunning time lapse of the sun that could help unravel one of the most enduring mysteries concerning our home star.
The footage, taken by the European Space Agency's Proba-3 mission, captures three major plumes of plasma jetting out of the sun's surface. By studying it further, astronomers want to learn why the sun's faint atmosphere, or corona, is hundreds of times hotter than its surface.
A better understanding of the warp and weft of the sun's magnetic-field lines could help researchers make better predictions of when these lines will snap to unleash solar flares, some of which can have devastating consequences for Earth.
Ben Turner is a U.K. based writer and editor at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.
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