A subtle brightness dip called the red giant branch bump challenges standard stellar models — and rotation may be the missing ingredient theorists have overlooked.

Earth may outlast the Sun's explosive death — but only if the Sun sheds its mass fast enough, upending what astronomers long assumed was a settled fate.

Fossil teeth tinier than a fingernail are challenging the long-held idea that primates only thrived after an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

The scientist who built his career on the "extreme male brain" theory of autism now says the phrase itself does more harm than good.

A thousand toads exploded in Hamburg in 2005 — and the prime suspect turned out to be something far stranger than pollution or disease.

Roger Penrose argues consciousness lives in quantum vibrations inside brain microtubules — a claim now precise enough to test outside the brain entirely.

Indonesia's tiny "hobbits" may have scavenged lizard leftovers rather than hunted elephants — a finding that rewrites their place in the human family tree.

A 1.5-million-year-old vertebra found in Israel suggests human relatives left Africa far earlier than the Out of Africa theory assumed.

Scientists now think Earth might survive the Sun's violent death — raising the question of what "survival" even means for a scorched, lifeless rock.

Satoshi Ide's team found giant earthquakes forming exactly where classic theory says they cannot — raising the question of what we're missing about fault planes.

In the minutes after death, the brain may launch a desperate internal survival search — and the emotional replays people report in NDEs could be the evidence.

Ozempic was built to shrink waistlines, but biohackers and aging researchers now ask whether GLP-1 drugs might also slow the clock on death itself.

A shark expert's "shock theory" on the Bondi great white has beaches closed four days straight — what does he think is really going on?

A marine biologist has a blunt explanation for why Bondi Beach closed four days straight over shark sightings — and it may say more about us than the sharks.

A 300,000-year-old all-female Homo naledi burial site is forcing scientists to rethink which species were capable of ritual and symbolic behavior.

The last Neanderthals' DNA is challenging the leading theory that inbreeding drove their extinction — so what actually finished them off?

Cats grooming each other has long been read as bonding — a new study suggests it may actually signal conflict between them.

Ancient DNA from the last northwestern Neanderthals has upended a leading theory about how and why they vanished — and the real story is thornier.

Kent Kiehl claims brain scans can detect violence in prisoners — and US courts are already acting on it, with grave consequences for the scanned.

A massive Canadian census study puts psychosocial acceleration theory to the test — and finds that harsh environments don't always trigger early reproduction the way evolution predicts.