Natali Anderson

Named Panthera pardus burgtonnae, the newly-identified leopard subspecies roamed Europe during the Eemian interglacial period and was far more heavily built than modern leopards.

A large review of clinical trials published this week in the journal PAIN suggests that melatonin — the over-the-counter sleep supplement taken by millions of people — may offer meaningful relief for patients suffering from chronic musculoskeletal conditions such as low back pain, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia.

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have measured carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar visitor to sweep through the Solar System. Their analysis suggests the interstellar comet formed in the cold outer reaches of a protoplanetary disk surrounding a star far older and more metal-poor than our own.

On July 2, 2026, the Tianwen-2 probe closed to within 20 km (12.4 miles) of the small near-Earth asteroid 2016 HO3, one of only seven Earth quasi-satellites identified to date, kicking off a science campaign ahead of an eventual sample-return attempt.

People who naturally stay up late may be more prone to obesity and poorer metabolic health in part because they consume more of their daily calories late in the evening, according to a new study of women of European and Pacific ancestry in New Zealand.

On July 5, 2026, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft completed the first asteroid encounter of its extended mission, flying past the two-lobed near-Earth asteroid Torifune and returning its close-up visible and thermal images.

Slow-motion video reveals that buff-tailed bumblebees ( Bombus terrestris ) respond to sweet and bitter tastes with distinct, context-dependent behaviors resembling mammalian expressions of pleasure and disgust, adding fresh evidence to the debate over insect consciousness.

Using the Yebes 40-m and IRAM 30-m radio telescopes, astronomers have discovered erythrulose, a four-carbon sugar commonly found in raspberries and sunless tanning cosmetics, in the molecular cloud G+0.693-0.027.

Paleontologists in China have discovered what they say is the earliest confirmed pieces of amber ever found, a fossilized resin roughly 385 million years old (Middle Devonian epoch) that predates the previous record-holder by about 65 million years. The discovery also suggests that resin production evolved in plants well before seed plants existed.

New data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft show temperatures spike more than 20 degrees Celsius just a few meters under Io’s surface, providing the first look at what’s happening below the crust of the Solar System’s most volcanic world.