Original/Natazbig™

Two new deep-sea siphonophores were named, one with a fiery red body. MBARI and partners paired DNA and undersea video to sort eight Bargmannia species into two lineages split by depth. B. marlena has stretchy orange stomachs (Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society).

The scattered human bones at Göbekli Tepe may come from landslides, not a skull cult. Its first intact graves, found in 2017 and 2022, lay under house floors upslope. Slope slides could have carried bones from such burials into the pillar buildings below (PLOS ONE).

Three minutes after a magnitude 6.5 quake in March 2025, rock buried up to half of an Arctic glacier. Nearly a million cubic meters fell onto Kjerulf Glacier on Norway's Jan Mayen. Slides in 2017-2024, possibly aided by thawing permafrost, had weakened the slope (PNAS).

Stepping out of bounds on purpose to touch the kickoff first. One freshman turned a rulebook trick into 32 free yards.

A dead star is circled by two separate rings of gas, unlike any of the 21 such disks seen before. VLT spectra of white dwarf WD J1328-1450 show four-peaked lines, not two. Two surviving bodies, a few km to Pluto-size, may keep the rings apart (Nature Astronomy).

A record hot drought killed swaths of Uluru's desert plants, tough species included. Anangu and scientists studied nine keystone species after the 2018-19 dieback, among them mulga and desert oak. Plants whose leaves lost the most water died back most (Conservation Physiology).

Ants may owe part of their success to jumping genes. In genomes of 163 ant species, lineages with the most of these mobile DNA bits have the most species today. Their bursts came in the early Paleogene and are tied to a boom in smell-receptor genes (Science Advances).

Early humans reached the Jordan Valley at least 1.9 million years ago. Three dating methods put 'Ubeidiya, a hand-axe site south of the Sea of Galilee, at 1.9 million years or more, up from 1.2 to 1.6 million, about as old as Dmanisi in Georgia (Quaternary Science Reviews).

Rising seas have made oyster reefs grow three times faster. Cores from 25 North Carolina reefs showed growth tripled as sea-level rise sped up from about 0.9 to 2.4 mm a year after 1800, yet none was a net carbon sink, because building shells releases CO2 (Nature Geoscience).

Final out, 4-1, and the Brewers are World Series champions for the first time ever. Look at the closer's face. That's decades of waiting let out in one scream.

A lava planet 280 light-years away reflects about 75% of its starlight. Webb watched TOI-561 b for 37 hours and found a substantial atmosphere, likely with silicate clouds acting as sunscreen, on a world expected to have lost its air long ago (The Astronomical Journal).

A new fungus from China stands up to 50 cm tall, the biggest of its kind. Dianjunus rex, or D-rex, grows from oak roots in Yunnan, weighs up to 2.2 kg, and founds a new family that arose about 65 million years ago, just after the dinosaurs died out (Frontiers in Fungal Biology).

A jumping spider that hunts other spiders sleeps in two stages, one of them REM-like. Infrared night video of Australia's coin-sized Portia fimbriata showed eye movements and muscle twitches, slowed reactions to a sound test, and catch-up sleep after being disturbed (PNAS).

Southern Africa's first known stencil rock art was found in a shelter used for church services. At La Rochelle in Mpumalanga, South Africa, two 9 cm human figures were made by splattering red paint around a purpose-made template (South African Archaeological Bulletin).

Earth may have made much of its own water while it was still growing. Lab tests heated rock to 1,200 to 1,400 C in hydrogen gas, turning nearly 80% of its iron oxide into metal and releasing water vapor, possibly enough over time for hundreds of oceans (Nature Geoscience).

A hydrogen cloud with 2 billion suns' worth of gas shows no visible stars. AGC 322753, about 310 million light-years away, was detected by Arecibo and China's FAST and seems to spin like a disk, a strong dark galaxy candidate (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society).

Pitaya cactus seeds sprout better after a trip through a mammal's gut. In Mexico, seeds from hare droppings reached nearly 98% germination, and seeds passed by bats and ringtails sprouted days before seeds taken from the fruit (Revista Latinoamericana de Recursos Naturales).