Science

Every person you know has a name, and you've likely given one to your pets, too. But are names a uniquely human feature, or do other animals also call each other by name?Research suggests that some mammals and birds use vocal labels for other individuals, but not all scientists agree on how to interpret the evidence.In the 1960s, scientists discovered that young bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops) create individually distinctive whistles, called signature whistles. Researchers in the years since have

GLP-1 wins again.ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked, and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Don't miss a story, subscribe here.

The koala population collapse was already underway long before the first people reached Australia, according to a new reading of the species’ genomes. Researchers calibrated a genetic clock from koala families, then applied it to 457 wild koala genomes collected across the species’ range. Their reconstruction places the beginning of a large decline at roughly 100,000 years ago. That is tens of thousands of years earlier than the broad 65,000-to-47,000-year window commonly given for m

Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions Mars Home 3 min read Curiosity Blog, Sols 4982–4987: Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming NASA’s Mars

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology report that gutless marine worms make an enzyme that breaks down the bioplastic their skin bacteria build up, a job that had only ever been demonstrated in bacteria and fungi, with two species of single-celled protist known to carry the sequence but never tested. Sequences resembling that enzyme had already been annotated in animal genomes. Nobody had shown that any of them worked. The new result is the functional demonstration, plu

Astronomers have found stars that repeatedly skim past supermassive black holes, surviving each encounter while producing a new burst of light. In some systems, those flares mysteriously fade with every return. Researchers now think the key may be stars that were already spinning extremely fast before being captured. That rapid rotation could explain both the fading flares and how the stars ended up in such extraordinarily tight black hole orbits.

Leaving work and losing work can look identical in a survey checkbox. They may be very different experiences for the person living through them. One can be a planned retirement, supported by savings and filled with chosen activity. The other can arrive at 57 because a factory contracts, construction slows or the local economy no longer has a realistic job for someone with the skills and roots built over decades. A 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper tries to use that differen

Greenland sharks may live for 400 years without suffering the kind of retinal decline normally associated with aging. Researchers found healthy eye tissue and active proteins specially adapted for seeing blue light in the dim Arctic depths. DNA repair mechanisms may help keep their eyes functioning across centuries. The discovery could eventually offer new clues for protecting human vision as we age.

Mice that developed compulsive drinking after alcohol abstinence showed more than double the activity in a brain region associated with stress and addiction. Because the signal appeared before they drank again, researchers think it could eventually help predict who is most at risk of relapse.

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Experiments and theoretical analysis show that under extreme magnetic fields, electrons in zirconium pentatelluride behave in an unusual way that points to a topological origin rather than interactions among many particles. Under magnetic fields strong enough to push electrons toward their quantum limits, zirconium pentatelluride (ZrTe₅) did something conventional theory says should not happen. Its [...]

In 1978, a worker at the Turkey Point nuclear plant, on the edge of Biscayne Bay south of Miami, stumbled on something along one of the plant’s cooling canals: a clutch of eggs, buried in the raised dirt bank. They belonged to an American crocodile. At that moment, the American crocodile was one of the most doomed animals in the country. Decades of coastal development had paved over its nesting beaches, and the entire United States population had collapsed to a few hundred animals, by s

Drive through Milam County, Texas, past the endless glinting rows of one of the biggest solar projects in America, and look under the panels. Down in the shade, working steadily through the grass, are sheep. Thousands of them. They are not decoration. They are the maintenance crew, and across Texas they have become a booming industry of their own, built on a simple piece of livestock arithmetic: of all the animals a rancher might turn loose on a solar farm, exactly one of them doesn’t w

Ask people near the end of their lives what they regret, and you tend to hear about roads not taken rather than mistakes made: the trip never booked, the words never said, the chance never chased. It is a staple of deathbed wisdom, and unusually for that kind of folk saying, it is genuinely backed by research. But the science adds two things the slogan leaves out, and both make it more precise and more useful. The first is that this is specifically a long-run phenomenon; in the short term, peopl

An experiment by researchers at the University of California San Diego and TU Wien has revealed a new quantum regime that generates coherent X-rays at higher energies than conventional rules predict. When intense laser light strikes certain atoms, the atoms can respond by producing laser pulses at far higher frequencies, reaching into the X-ray range. [...]

MeerKAT has detected a record-breaking hydroxyl megamaser from a merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away, opening a new way to study the early universe. Using South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, astronomers have identified the farthest hydroxyl megamaser ever observed, marking a major step forward for radio astronomy. A hydroxyl megamaser is a naturally [...]

Seal found dead at Beachport in South Australia presages ‘significant losses’, minister warnsFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastA long-nosed fur seal has died from H5 bird flu in South Australia, marking the first confirmed case in a mammal on the Australian mainland. The seal was found dead at Beachport on Wednesday on the state’s Limestone Coast. It marks a fresh escalation in the spread of the virus days after the

The brain doesn’t retire when you stop formal work is one of those lines that is true in an obvious way and true in a far more interesting one. Obviously the brain keeps running; it does not clock off because you have. The stronger and more useful version of the claim is that the brain remains capable of learning and changing throughout life, and that it responds to whether or not you keep using it. That makes retirement a genuine fork in the road for the mind, not a neutral event. A brain

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Early retirement is sold as pure reward: freedom, no alarm clock, endless open days. Which is why the experience catches so many people off guard. A surprising number who reach the goal they worked toward for decades find, within a year or two, that they are bored and quietly lonely, and then feel guilty for not simply enjoying their good fortune. That reaction is neither a failure of character nor a lack of gratitude. It is predictable, and it has a clear cause: work quietly provides far more t