An experiment that, by design, was not supposed to turn up anything of note instead produced a “bewildering” surprise, according to the Stanford scientists who made the discovery: a new way of creating gold nanoparticles and nanowires using water droplets.

Diamonds found in a meteorite that exploded over the Nubian desert in Sudan a decade ago were formed deep inside a “lost planet” that once circled the sun in the early solar system, scientists say. Microscopic analyses of the meteorite’s tiny diamonds revealed they contain compounds that are produced under intense pressure, suggesting the diamonds formed far beneath the surface of a planet.

High in the treetops of Borneo, there’s an ant with a deadly secret. It can explode. On the outside, it’s just an inconspicuous, brownish-red ant. It lacks large mandibles, cannot sting, and generally seems like easy pickings for any predator with a rumbly in the tumbly. But when these ants feel threatened, they raise up their rumps as a warning, says Alice Laciny, an entomologist with Natural History Museum Vienna in Austria who described the first new species of exploding ant since 1935 in the journal Zookeys.

According to a report in The Local, a burned lump recovered near a fireplace at Sandby Borg on the island of Öland is a 1,500-year-old onion. However, archaeologist Helena Victor explained that onions were not grown in Scandinavia at the time. She thinks the vegetable may have been imported from the Roman Empire as an exotic vegetable. “An onion doesn’t sound very interesting,” Victor said, but she notes that the next-oldest onion to have been found in Scandinavia dated to A.D. 650.

The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests settlements in the Amazon were far more wide-ranging than scholars once thought

If you lived in what is now Wyoming 49 million years ago, you could have spotted a four-eyed lizard—the one and only known example of such a creature among jawed vertebrates. The species, an extinct monitor lizard called Saniwa ensidens (above), had two standard eyes and also sported so-called pineal and parapineal “eyes” on the top of its head (shown as white dots in the reconstructed image below).

Archaeologists have made an extraordinary discovery on the island of Rügen: they have recovered coins and jewellery which date back to the reign of the well-known Danish king Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson (910-987). At the weekend archaeologists from the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania excavated an area of about 400 square metres in an open field near the Rügen village of Schaprode.

At twice the size of India, the Amazon is massive. But although it constitutes the world’s largest remaining tropical rainforest and hosts 10 percent of the world’s biodiversity and over 30 million humans, 95 percent of it remains unexplored. The terre firme is uncharted, and, according to a new paper, it hides many archaeological secrets.

In 2014, archaeologists digging in the sands of Calvert Island, British Columbia, made an unexpected discovery: a single footprint pressed into the clay below the surface. Subsequent excavations turned up 28 more footprints, the oldest in North America.

Palaeontologists have discovered part of the skeleton of a 180 million-year-old pregnant ichthyosaur with the remains of between six and eight tiny embryos between its ribs.The new specimen was studied by palaeontologists Mike Boyd and Dean Lomax from The University of Manchester. It was collected around 2010 from near Whitby, North Yorkshire and is from the Early Jurassic. The fossil was in the collection of fossil collector, Martin Rigby, who thought the specimen might be a block of embryos. Dean confirmed the suspicion and the specimen was acquired by the Yorkshire Museum, York. https://goo.gl/1A6kmf

A sauropod footprint discovered at Brothers' Point on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

The quickest supernova we’ve ever seen went from invisible to extraordinarily bright in only 2.2 days. It is the first of these speedy stellar explosions that’s been observed thoroughly enough to help us figure out exactly how they work. Supernovae are massive explosions that happen when a star burns out. They usually take weeks or months after the death of the star to reach maximum brightness, and even longer to fade away.

Say hello to Macrobiotus shonaicus, a completely new species of tardigrade—those incredibly resilient microscopic wee beasties that likely have what it takes to survive the apocalypse.

The microbes make a compound that disrupts DNA formation in tumor cells. Certain skin-dwelling microbes may be anticancer superheroes, reining in uncontrolled cell growth. This surprise discovery could one day lead to drugs that treat or maybe even prevent skin cancer.

Physicists make misaligned sheets of the carbon material conduct electricity without resistance.

  The world’s oldest known message in a bottle has been found half-buried at a West Australian beach nearly 132 years after it was tossed overboard in the Indian Ocean, 950km from the coast. Until now, the previous world record for the oldest message in a bottle was 108 years, four months and 18 days between jettison and discovery.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a strange kind of galaxy surprisingly close to home. A new study published Monday in Nature reports that Hubble scientists have found a “relic galaxy” called NGC 1277 about 240 million light-years away near the Perseus cluster. The galaxy is only a quarter the size of the Milky Way, but in its early days, scientists think NGC 1277 could crank out stars about 1,000 times faster than our own galaxy.

You don’t have to know a whole lot about science to know that black holes normally suck things in, not spew things out. But NASA detected something mighty bizarre at the supermassive black hole Markarian 335. Two of NASA’s space telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), amazingly observed a black hole’s corona “launched” away from the supermassive black hole.

The fascinating remains of a historic 18th century ship have washed ashore on a Florida beach. The 48-foot wooden hull of a gigantic shipwreck was discovered by Julie Turner and her son Patrick, eight, on Ponte Vedra Beach around 8am Tuesday. Little did the pair realize that the wreck was centuries old and has been hailed as the 'holy grail' of shipwrecks.

Scientists have used a portable “atomic clock” to measure gravity for the first time. The device makes use of small changes in the flow of time at different altitudes to measure the Earth’s gravity. Generally speaking, atomic clocks are complex, delicate pieces of scientific equipment that are confined to labs and therefore cannot be used to make measurements in the field.

Scientists have just found a way to create a new form of light that could totally change the future of computing and communications. Researchers in a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were able to link photons and create an entirley new light form that could be used to build light crystals with tremendous scientific applications.

Roads of the future could be lit by glowing trees instead of streetlamps, thanks to a breakthrough in creating bioluminescent plants. Experts injected specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, which caused it to give off a dim light for nearly four hours. This could solve lots of problems. The chemical involved, which produced enough light to read a book by, is the same as is used by fireflies to create their characteristic shine. To create their glowing plants, engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) turned to...

Scientists have discovered a new species of shark which makes its home in the Atlantic Ocean. This particular family of the deep-sea predators was so elusive that it took scientists decades to identify that a new species exists in the Atlantic Ocean. The species belongs to the sixgill sharks family and has been named the Atlantic sixgill shark. Unlike the sixgill sharks residing in the Indian and Pacific oceans, who share similarities with each other, the Atlantic sixgill sharks are different, although the differences are not easy to spot for the naked eye.

More than 1.5 million Adelie penguins were unexpectedly found on the Danger Islands.

Toxic deposits of the proteins amyloid beta and tau in the brain have been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, but the understanding of exactly how these proteins interact to cause dementia is still largely a mystery. Scientists at the University of Washington are using stem cells from Alzheimer’s patients to study the two proteins—and they’ve hit upon a compound that seems to lessen the buildup of them in brain cells.

ESA's Integral space observatory has witnessed a rare event: the moment that winds emitted by a swollen red giant star revived its slow-spinning companion, the core of a dead star, bringing it back to life in a flash of X-rays. The X-ray flare was first detected by Integral on 13 August 2017 from an unknown source in the direction of the crowded centre of our Milky Way. The sudden detection triggered a slew of follow-up observations in the following weeks to pin down the culprit.

The world’s oldest message in a bottle has been found on a beach in Western Australia by a couple who thought it might “look good on a bookshelf”. Tonya Illman found the 132-year-old gin bottle in the dunes near Wedge Island in January. Her husband, Kym Illman, told Guardian Australia she initially thought it was rubbish but picked it up because it had distinct, raised lettering and would be at home on their bookshelf.

A rare mineral with potential industrial and medical applications has been discovered on alpine plants at Cambridge University Botanic Garden. Scientists at Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University have found that the mineral vaterite, a form (polymorph) of calcium carbonate, is a dominant component of the protective silvery-white crust that forms on the leaves of a number of alpine plants, which are part of the Garden’s national collection of European Saxifraga species.

The new species found where few scientists have gone before

Scientists have pinpointed a population of virus-infected bats, which they have linked to the mysterious outbreak of Sars disease 15 years ago. Hundreds died as the virus spread around the globe but its source was never traced.

If you want to stick something on your fridge, like really get it stuck on hard there, you might want to talk to the scientists at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. They've just build the most powerful superconducting magnet ever, shattering the world record. Its magnetic field clocks in at 32 tesla in strength. That's 33 percent higher than the previous record, and 3,000 times stronger than a small fridge magnet, making this a larger increase than all the improvements in superconducting magnets from the last 40 years combined.

Mathematics is full of weird number systems that most people have never heard of and would have trouble even conceptualizing. But rational numbers are familiar. They’re the counting numbers and the fractions—all the numbers you’ve known since elementary school. But in mathematics, the simplest things are often the hardest to understand. They’re simple like a sheer wall, without crannies or ledges or obvious properties you can grab ahold of.

The first ever interstellar visitor to our solar system is wrapped in a layer of organic insulation, scientists have said. Oumuamua has enthralled astronomers and the public since it flew through the solar system in October. As the first alien rock to travel here from another star, it was immediately recognised as highly unusual – but as scientists learn more about the object, they are discovering how strange it actually is.

New NASA images show layers of ice peeking out of eroded cliffs—a potential boon for future humans on the red planet. Eroded banks throughout Mars's mid-latitudes reveal underground bands of bluish material. Spectra of these layers—which start three to six feet beneath the surface—strongly suggest that they are made of water ice.

Psssst, mud crabs, time to hide because blue crabs are coming to eat you! That’s the warning the prey get from the predators’ urine when it spikes with high concentrations of two chemicals, which researchers have identified in a new study. Beyond decoding crab-eat-crab alarm triggers, pinpointing these compounds for the first time opens new doors to understanding how chemicals invisibly regulate marine wildlife.