It’s hard to say which scientist was the first to set eyes on the glowing ring that makes up the world’s first image of a black hole. But astrophysicist Kazunori Akiyama was certainly one of the earliest. The image, released to the public on April 10, revealed the dark shadow of the supermassive black hole […]

Israel’s first lunar lander, Beresheet, appears to have crash-landed on the moon. The spacecraft, launched by the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL, was scheduled to touch down on the lunar surface on April 11. But in the final few minutes of its descent, the spacecraft’s engine stalled. Mission control reset Beresheet to bring its engine back online, […]

Over 100 hours of scanning has yielded a 3-D picture of the whole human brain that’s more detailed than ever before. The new view, enabled by a powerful MRI, has the resolution potentially to spot objects that are smaller than 0.1 millimeters wide. “We haven’t seen an entire brain like this,” says electrical engineer Priti […]

Divers monitoring coral reefs off St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January noticed something alarming: Big white lesions were eating into the colorful tissues of hundreds of stony corals. Some corals were dead by the next day — only their stark white skeletons remained. Others languished for up to two weeks. Within four […]

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft has made its second and final attempt to grab a pinch of dust from asteroid Ryugu. At about 9:06 p.m. EDT on July 10, the Japanese spacecraft briefly touched down near an artificial crater it had previously blasted into the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid’s surface. If the dust grab went well, it’s the first […]

There once was a little bird, smaller than a sparrow, that lived about 99 million years ago. And it had a freakishly long toe. Researchers found the ancient bird’s right leg and foot preserved in a chunk of amber. Its third digit is 9.8 millimeters long, about 41 percent longer than its second-longest digit — […]

Carlos Jared discovered the first known venomous frog by accident. And it took him a long time to connect his pain with tree frogs that head-butted his hand. Jared, now at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, got his first hint of true venom when collecting yellow-skinned frogs (Corythomantis greeningi) among cacti and scrubby trees […]

With the blessings of all 14 families of lost astronauts, a new memorial to the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters opened in June at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The permanent exhibit includes the first pieces of shuttle wreckage ever on public display, but fittingly focuses more on the lives lost. “Forever Remembered” […]

A female giraffe has a great Valentine’s Day gift for potential mates: urine. Distinctive anatomy helps male giraffes get a taste for whether a female is ready to mate, animal behaviorists Lynette and Benjamin Hart report January 19 in Animals. A pheromone-detecting organ in giraffes has a stronger connection to the mouth than the nose, […]

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the earliest known galaxy to abruptly stop forming stars. The galaxy, called GS-9209, quenched its star formation more than 12.5 billion years ago, researchers report January 26 at arXiv.org. That’s only a little more than a billion years after the Big Bang. Its existence reveals new details about […]