Astronomers used major telescopes across the world to probe a cosmic explosion 8 billion light-years from the solar system.
A gamma-ray burst (GRB) — the most energetic type of explosion in the universe since the Big Bang — is detected once every day, on average. But what happened on July 2, 2025, was highly unusual: NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which has been orbiting Earth since 2008, recorded an unusually long-lived GRB that continued emitting in bursts for more than seven hours.

Astronomers leaped into action, using the world's telescopes to detect the explosion's afterglow and discover where it came from.

The event, called GRB 250702B, was the longest-duration gamma-ray burst ever recorded. Astronomers now think it came from a previously unobserved or rare type of explosion that launched a narrow jet of material in the direction of the solar system, traveling at least 99% the speed of light.

Some of history's most important inventions can be credited to the British, from the steam engine to the World Wide Web.

Now, research places one of the world's most profound discoveries on our shores - the creation of fire.

A team of scientists led by the British Museum has unearthed the earliest known evidence of fire making, dating back over 400,000 years, in a field in Suffolk.

The discovery consists of a patch of heated clay, heat-shattered flint handaxes and two small pieces of iron pyrite that were likely produced by some of the oldest Neanderthal groups.

It shows humans were making fire around 350,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Scientists have discovered that over half a mile of DNA could hold over 360,000 terabytes of data.
Running out of space on your phone? Don't upgrade your cloud-storage subscription just yet. Scientists in China have discovered that images, text files and other digital data can be stored in strands of DNA fused to a 330-foot-long (100 meters) plastic strip capable of holding the equivalent of 3 billion songs.

It's a far cry from a device that Microsoft built in 2016, which managed to squeeze 200 megabytes of data into a dab of DNA "much smaller than the tip of a pencil."

The new "tape" can even be fed into a cassette-player-like reader that can scan the strip, pinpoint a chosen file, and retrieve it on demand. The team outlined their findings in a study published Sept. 10 in the journal Science Advances.

DNA is a long, double-helical molecule made from a unique sequence of four chemical bases — adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) — that together encode the genetic information of an organism. Similarly, every digital file is ultimately a combination of 1s and 0s that a computer can interpret as a PDF, JPEG or other file type.

If each base were to represent a specific pattern of 0s and 1s, then a piece of artificial DNA could be encoded to contain the binary code for digital files. This type of molecule does not come from a living organism, but is assembled in the lab by linking pre-manufactured nucleotide building blocks together in the desired sequence.

This is what the scientists did before printing the encoded DNA on a long piece of tape. A solution containing the strands was passed over the strip so they adsorbed to the polymer surface.

"DNA has the potential to become the next-generation information storage medium due to its high storage density," the authors wrote in the study. "The rolled configuration of the DNA tape efficiently maximizes the spatial utilization of the material, enabling portability and extending the number of available areas and storage capacity by increasing its length."

Each section of the tape is printed with a barcode indicating which file is held there. A camera on the cassette-player-like machine then scans the tape as it moves between its two rollers, locates a file and dips that spot into a basic solution that releases the DNA. The DNA can then be sequenced, and that sequence of bases can be translated into the file's code.

In other words, the matter traveled at 20% the speed of light.

Supermassive black holes are notoriously messy eaters, but the behemoth at the heart of spiral galaxy NGC 3783 really takes the cake — and then flings it out into space at a fifth the speed of light.

Astronomers recently spotted a gale of hot, charged particles erupting from this black hole in the aftermath of a powerful X-ray flare that occurred just a few hours earlier. As one of the study's co-authors, Matteo Guainazzi,described it in a statement, picture a cosmic storm "similar to the flares that erupt from the sun, but on a scale almost too big to imagine." Guainazzi is a project scientist on the European Space Agency's XRISM X-ray telescope, which led to these results.

Inside cowboy Charles Jesse "Buffalo" Jones's get-rich-quick scheme to restore the plains 100 years ago.

The "cattalo" was a homely creature — stocky and shaggy, with a slight buffalo's hump and a cow's docile face. Charles "Buffalo" Jones invented the cow-buffalo hybrid in 1888. His intention? To create the hardiest free-range livestock the Great Plains had ever seen. But Jones could've never predicted what happened next.

In December 1925, Popular Science heralded Jones's cattalo as a bold scientific attempt to invent a new meat supply: "Great herds of cattaloes, it is expected, will increase at no expense, as long as the northern plains remain unsettled, repeating the history of our prairie buffalo." But the crossbreed was doomed from the start, its proliferation stymied by poor fertility rates that were not well understood at the time. In the century since, such biological hurdles haven't stopped efforts to try to carry on what Jones started.

Scientists conduct study in 'home of Chinese dinosaurs', discover that flat rocks with 'chicken claw' prints are from Jurassic period

Two brothers in southwestern China have been shocked to find that rocks they used as simple stepping stones for decades are 190-million-year-old dinosaur footprint fossils.

On November 29, researchers completed a study into dinosaur tracks found decades ago in Wuli village, Sichuan province.

The mainland media then revealed that the rocks have a fascinating backstory.

According to Guangming Daily, while quarrying stone in 1998, the Ding brothers found rocks with "chicken claw prints" and used them as stepping stones.

Humans first travelled to the ancient landmass that would become Australia and New Guinea about 60,000 years ago via two routes, a new genetic analysis suggests.

The findings, published today in Science Advances, bring the date of when the First Australians arrived in Sahul — based on genetic evidence — much closer to those in the archaeological record of about 65,000 years.

According to Christopher Clarkson, an archaeologist at Griffith University, the question of when First Nations people arrived in Australia has sparked ongoing "fierce debate" in the fields of genetics and archaeology.

Until now, dates based on genetics placed arrival between 47,000 and 51,000 years ago.

"We've been pointing to this mystery of why is there this time gap, and why does the genetics not match the older archaeological record?" Professor Clarkson, who was not involved in the new study, said.

"Now, with this new analysis ... we can see for the first time that actually these two things do match very well."

A lonely rover toiling among the sands of Mars has now answered an age-old question: If lightning crackles on the red planet and no one hears it, does it still make a sound?

In recordings obtained by NASA's Perseverance rover, scientists have identified, for the first time, electrical discharges captured during Mars's wild dust events and whirling dust devils - not once, but 55 times over two Martian years of observation.

Crucially, the dusty weather in which these events appeared reveals the specific conditions required to generate electricity in the thin, bone-dry atmosphere of Mars - long suspected but never directly demonstrated until now.

"Whatever creature made these magnetofossils, we now know it was most likely capable of accurate navigation."

Animals like birds and sea turtles navigate using a "biological GPS" called magnetoreception. We now actually know that many animals use this method to connect with Earth's magnetic field so they know where to go — but scientists don't really understand how the whole process works yet.

As such, researchers at Cambridge University and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin have been studying tiny ancient fossils littering ocean floors to learn more about magnetoreception. And sure enough, the team says they've discovered that these "magnetofossils" indeed exhibit magnetoreception. Because they found the magnetofossils in sediments that date back 97 million years, their work could be the first time we've had direct evidence that animals have been navigating the world like this for a very long time.

An investigation into why blood doesn't always behave as doctors expect has revealed a super-rare mutation in an extremely uncommon variation of blood.

Testing more than 544,000 blood samples in a hospital in Thailand revealed three people carrying a never-before-seen version of the B(A) phenotype - a genetic quirk estimated to occur in about 0.00055 percent of people, or roughly one in 180,000.

This discovery, says a team led by hematologist Janejira Kittivorapart of Mahidol University in Thailand, suggests that there may be more rare blood variants out there, too subtle for standard testing to detect.

Human blood is categorized into eight main groups based on the sugars and proteins - or lack thereof - stuck all over your red blood cells.

A, B, and AB types are based on the shape of antigens, sugar molecules that can trigger an immune response. O-type blood has no A or B antigens. Meanwhile, rhesus factors are proteins that determine blood compatibility, and are what give your blood its + or - designation.