Science

The young offspring of a frog native to Southeast Asia display an "unusual color pattern", probably to camouflage themselves "as animal droppings" to escape predators, according to a study.

A team of researchers studying juvenile Wallace's flying frogs -- which are bright red with small white dots -- made the findings thanks to an experiment at Vienna's Schoenbrunn Zoo, the zoo said on Thursday.

Antiviral drugs are generally considered to be a 20th century invention. But recent research has uncovered an unexpected facet to your immune system: It can synthesize its own antiviral molecules in response to viral infections.

My laboratory studies a protein that makes these natural antiviral molecules. Far from a modern human invention, nature evolved cells to make their own “drugs” as the earliest defense against viruses.

When you hear the word comet, you might imagine a bright streak moving across the sky. You may have a family member who saw a comet before you were born, or you may have seen one yourself when comet Nishimura passed by Earth in September 2023. But what are these special celestial objects made of? Where do they come from, and why do they have such long tails?

As a planetarium director, I spend most of my time getting people excited about and interested in space. Nothing piques people’s interest in Earth’s place in the universe quite like comets. They’re unpredictable, and they often go undetected until they get close to the Sun. I still get excited when one comes into view.

A sample collected from the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu contains abundant water and carbon, NASA revealed on Wednesday, offering more evidence for the theory that life on Earth was seeded from outer space.

The discovery follows a seven-year-round-trip to the distant rock as part of the OSIRIS-REx mission, which dropped off its precious payload in the Utah desert last month for painstaking scientific analysis.

NASA is set to reveal on Wednesday the first images of the largest asteroid sample ever collected in space, something scientists hope will yield clues about the earliest days of our solar system and perhaps the origins of life itself.

The OSIRIS-REx mission collected rock and dust from the asteroid Bennu in 2020, and a capsule containing the precious cargo successfully returned to Earth a little over two weeks ago, landing in the Utah desert.

Global scientists warned Tuesday that 45% of known flowering plant species could be at risk of disappearing, underscoring the need for urgent international action to tackle the planet's sixth mass extinction—the first driven by human activity.

That figure is among the key findings from State of the World's Plants and Fungi, the fifth annual report from the U.K.'s Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) Kew, about such species amid the intertwined biodiversity crisis and climate emergency.

A wave of unusually extreme heat at the end of South America's winter was made 100 times more likely by climate change, according to a study published Tuesday.

"While many people have pointed to El Nino to explain the South America heat wave, this analysis has shown that climate change is the primary driver of the heat," said Lincoln Muniz Alves, a researcher at the Brazil National Institute for Space Research who participated in the study by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.

Cancer arises when cells accumulate enough damage to change their normal behavior. The likelihood of accruing damage increases with age because the safeguards in your genetic code that ensure cells function for the greater good of the body weaken over time.

Why, then, do children who haven’t had sufficient time to accumulate damage develop cancer?

The Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) sprung its third coolant leak in under a year Monday, raising new questions about the reliability of the country's space program even as officials said crew members were not in danger.

Flakes of frozen coolant spraying into space were seen in an official live feed of the orbital lab provided by NASA around 1:30 pm Eastern Time (1730 GMT), and confirmed in radio chatter between US mission control and astronauts.