RNA, which is one of life's most crucial molecules dealing with the synthesis of proteins, could be common in the universe, according to a new experiment that shows how RNA could easily have formed on Earth 4.3 billion years ago.

RNA (short for ribonucleic acid) is a simpler cousin of DNA, which is the molecule that contains the genetic information for our cellular biology. RNA comes in a trio of guises. There is messenger RNA (mRNA) that is produced from DNA and contains the genetic instructions for forming proteins. Then there's ribosomal RNA (rRNA) that creates ribosomes vital for producing proteins, and finally transfer RNA (tRNA) that does the actual synthesizing of the proteins from mRNA.

Because it is a simpler molecule than DNA, RNA is thought to have formed first, and thanks to its ability to carry genetic information and create other molecules, RNA has even been heralded as a possible main player in the story of the origin of life on Earth in a hypothesis colloquially known as "RNA world." In this scenario, the first single-celled lifeforms would have used RNA rather than DNA for self-replicating and copying their genetic information.

Understanding how RNA formed has, however, been challenging. What prompted RNA's ingredients to come together just so and undergo the correct series of chemical reactions? On the face of it, the odds of RNA forming just by chance seem astronomical.

So chemists look for pathways that could inevitably lead to the formation of molecules like RNA. One pathway is known as the six-step Discontinuous Synthesis Model (DSM).

However, one of the stumbling blocks on this pathway is borate, which is a family of common compounds found in seawater. Borates are oxyanions; if ions are atoms or molecules that have a positive electrical charge, then anions have an overall negative electrical charge. Further, borates contain atoms of both boron and oxygen. The problem is that it had been thought that borates hinder some of the reactions on the chemical pathway to RNA.

Now, a team of biochemists led by Yuta Hirakawa of Tohoku University in Japan and the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida say that chemists have been getting it wrong and that borates are actually beneficial to the formation of RNA.

Watch Rare Footage Of The Giant Phantom Jellyfish, A 10-Meter-Long "Ghost" That's Only Been Seen Around 100 Times

Plunge 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) below the ocean’s surface, and there can be found the midnight zone, where the complete lack of sunlight and extreme cold and pressure have led to the evolution of all manner of ethereal weirdos. One of the rarest members of the gang? The giant phantom jellyfish (Stygiomedusa gigantea). Read more

Galaxies might be separated by hundreds of thousands of light-years at the very least, but they do occasionally merge. During those collisions, the supermassive black holes that sit at the center of those galaxies can become active, entering a feeding frenzy thanks to fresh supplies of gas being thrown towards the core by the merger. For the first time, researchers report a three-way merger with all three supermassive black holes active and emitting in radio waves at the same time.

The system is known as J1218/1219+1035, and is located 1.2 billion light-years from us. The three nuclei of the three galaxies, where the supermassive black holes reside, have a separation of roughly 22,000 and 97,000 light-years. The merger is not imminent on human timescales, but they are getting there.

Large spiral galaxies like the Milky Way have grown in size thanks to interactions with smaller companions. Large elliptical galaxies are the product of collisions between spiral galaxies; likely how it will happen between the Milky Way and Andromeda in several billion years. Getting three galaxies merging is a lot less common, and getting all three of them active is rarer still.

“Triple active galaxies like this are incredibly rare, and catching one in the middle of a merger gives us a front-row seat to how massive galaxies and their black holes grow together,” lead author Dr Emma Schwartzman of the US Naval Research Laboratory said in a statement. 

For these cheetahs, even a successful hunt can still end in failure.

In 1917, a group of German soldiers arrived at a military hospital near Freiburg after returning from a campaign in Dobrudja, a region of the Balkans that had been riddled with disease. All of the troops had been struck down with a nasty case of dysentery caused by the Shigella group of bacteria – except for one soldier, who was remarkably unaffected by the deadly illness that struck down his comrades.

The case caught the attention of Professor Alfred Nissle, a physician at the hospital who had grown increasingly interested in the bacterial contents of the human intestine. 

Experiments inside a fusion reactor in China have demonstrated a new way to circumvent one of the caps on the density of the superheated plasma swirling inside.

At the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), physicists successfully exceeded what is known as the Greenwald limit, a practical density boundary beyond which plasmas tend to violently destabilize, often damaging reactor components.

For a long time, the Greenwald limit was accepted as a given and incorporated into fusion reactor engineering. The new work shows that precise control over how the plasma is created and interacts with the reactor walls can push it beyond this limit into what physicists call a 'density-free' regime.

Fusion reactors are designed to replicate the intense nuclear fusion that occurs in the heart of the Sun, generating vast amounts of energy. There are a number of significant barriers to overcome – one of which is plasma density.

In a rare move, NASA is cutting a mission aboard the International Space Station short after an astronaut had a medical issue.

The space agency said Thursday the U.S.-Japanese-Russian crew of four will return to Earth in the coming days, earlier than planned.

NASA canceled its first spacewalk of the year because of the health issue. The space agency did not identify the astronaut or the medical issue, citing patient privacy. The crew member is now stable.

NASA officials stressed that it was not an onboard emergency, but are "erring on the side of caution for the crew member," said Dr. James Polk, NASA's chief health and medical officer.

Polk said this was NASA's first medical evacuation from the space station although astronauts have been treated aboard for things like toothaches and ear pain.

Europa might not be the best place to look for alien life in the solar system after all.

A new study modeling what the floor of the Jupiter moon's hidden ocean is like concluded that tectonic activity — and the complex chemical reactions that such activity facilitates — is probably negligible.

"Ultimately, without fracturing and faulting, it's not clear to us how fresh rock would be exposed to the ocean to allow for the kinds of continued chemical reactions that microbes would need to sustain themselves," study lead author Paul Byrne, associate professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Science at Washington University in St. Louis, told Space.com.

Physicists from Trinity College Dublin believe new insights into the behavior of light may offer a new means of solving one of science's oldest challenges—how to turn heat into useful energy.

Their theoretical leap forwards, which will now be tested in the lab, could influence the development of specialized devices that would ultimately increase the amount of energy we can capture from sunlight (and lamps and LEDs) and then repurpose to perform useful tasks.

The work has just been published in the journal, Physical Review A.

When photons (particles of light) are trapped in microscopic optical devices, they can undergo a form of condensation, where they behave collectively rather than as independent particles. In practice, this concentrates light energy into a small, intense beam of a single very pure color, similar to the output of a laser.

This phenomenon has been seen in experiments, but only when the energy input is already in the concentrated form provided by a laser. Now though, thanks to the new theoretical analysis, the physicists think it can be achieved using input energy in a diffused form, like that readily provided by sunlight, lamps, or LEDs.

Paul Eastham, Naughton Associate Professor, School of Physics, Trinity, is the senior author of the study. He said, "We modeled the behavior of devices which trap light in a small region of space and found that this behavior is related to the general properties of heat engines: machines that convert disorganized energy, which we physicists call 'heat,' into a useful form, which we call 'work.'"

"In this way, the same laws that limit steam engines and power plants determine whether photons condense or not. Beyond the conceptual appeal of this work, we believe it could influence the development of optical devices which rely on channeling the flow of light energy at the quantum level, from solar cells to microscopic engines powered by radiation."

The world's oceans absorbed a record amount of heat in 2025, an international team of scientists said Friday, further priming conditions for sea level rise, violent storms, and coral death.

The heat that has accumulated in the oceans last year increased by approximately 23 zettajoules—an amount equivalent to nearly four decades of global primary energy consumption.

This finding—published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences—was the highest reading of any year since modern record keeping began in the early 1950s, researchers said.

To derive these calculations, more than 50 scientists from 31 research institutions used multiple sources including a thousands-strong fleet of floating robots that track ocean changes to depths of 2,000 meters.

Peering into the depths, rather than fluctuations at the surface, provides a better indicator of how oceans are responding to "sustained pressure" from humanity's emissions, said study co-author Karina von Schuckmann.

How to change your camera battery in weightlessness.

Tuberculosis has plagued humanity for thousands of years, and despite medical advances that can now help us prevent and cure it, the ancient bacterial disease still claims more human lives per year than any other infectious pathogen.

In a new study, researchers unveil a device meant to demystify the early stages of TB, including a peculiar delay that often precedes the onset of symptoms.

Their model could also reveal how genetic variations in patients lead to varying effects of TB, with potentially broad implications for personalized medicine.

About a quarter of our species is infected with TB bacteria, and while only a fraction of those people will become sick, that still amounts to more than 10 million new cases – and more than 1 million deaths – per year worldwide.

TB progresses slowly, with symptoms often taking months to appear. To learn more about this lag, the authors focused on tiny air sacs in the lungs, pulmonary alveoli, which host pivotal confrontations between immune cells and bacteria.

Whether you have a full seasonal rotation or just layer up, changing clothes for the cold is natural for us - but did you know that some animals do this too?

See how and why some species go white in the winter in this week’s Surprising Science! ❄️

Sponges are considered some of the oldest animals on Earth, yet researchers have struggled to pin down when they first appeared. Studies of DNA from modern sponges, together with chemical clues preserved in ancient rocks, point to an origin at least 650 million years ago. The research was recently published in Science Advances.

That early date has sparked debate because it comes at least 100 million years before the earliest known sponge fossils. An international research team led by Dr. M. Eleonora Rossi of the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences set out to resolve this mismatch by focusing on how sponge skeletons evolved.

Your ability to notice what matters visually comes from an ancient brain system over 500 million years old. The brain can make sense of the visual world even without relying on its most advanced outer layer, the cortex. A new study published in PLOS Biology shows that a far older brain structure, known as the superior colliculus, has the neural machinery needed to carry out essential visual computations. These processes allow the brain to separate objects from their background and determine which visual signals matter most in a given space.

The research also shows that these ancient circuits, which exist in all vertebrate brains, can independently produce center surround interactions. This basic visual principle helps the brain detect contrast, edges, and visually important features in the environment.

On Jan. 8th, 2026, NASA announced its decision to return the SpaceX Crew-11 mission to Earth from the International Space Station earlier than originally planned. This unprecedented move came after one of the crew members reportedly experienced a health-related issue that required full medical services. While the crew member (who has not been identified for privacy reasons) was reported to be in stable condition, NASA will go ahead with the early return mission. According to the latest updates, the Crew-11 mission team will splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on Thursday, Jan.15th. at approximately 3:40 a.m. EST (Jan. 14th, 12:40 pm PST).

The crew consists of NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, who will splash down off the coast of California at approximately 3:40 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 15th. NASA is also working with SpaceX and international partners to review launch options for the Crew-12 mission. This will leave the station in the hands of the remaining three flight engineers of Expedition 74, consisting of NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev.

🛰️Pandora’s near-infrared detector is a spare developed for NASAWebb, which is THE observatory most sensitive to exoplanet atmospheres.

Pandora will observe its targets for 24 hours, something flagship missions like Webb, which are in high demand, cannot regularly do.