It's a story that won't come as a surprise to anyone who's watched enough Antiques Roadshow -an old, not-very-well-loved relic kept out of sight by a family that doesn't like it much, only to later learn it's worth a staggering sum of money. In this case, a vase stashed for years wrapped in newspaper in a shoebox in an attic in France turned out to be a rare, exquisite Qing dynasty artifact and sold at auction Tuesday for a staggering €16 million this week - about $19 million, 20 times the estimate.

The discovery changes our understanding of the basic mechanism of photosynthesis and should rewrite the textbooks. It will also tailor the way we hunt for alien life and provide insights into how we could engineer more efficient crops that take advantage of longer wavelengths of light.

Mysterious streams of microwaves that come from far across the galaxy have been traced to immense clouds of spinning diamonds that swirl around newly-born stars. Astronomers have been stumped by the strange waves since they were first spotted more than 20 years ago, but now appear to have solved the puzzle after training US and Australian telescopes on rings of dust that circle stars about 500 light years from Earth.

Astronomers Seppo Mattila and Miguel Pérez-Torres usually study the natural deaths of stars, but they weren’t going to pass up the chance to investigate a stellar murder. A new paper in Science describes how they nabbed photographic evidence that a supermassive black hole in a relatively nearby galaxy tore apart and consumed part of a star in a phenomenon called a tidal disruption event (TDE), spewing jets of material in the process. Scientists have observed these cosmic crime scenes before, but this was the first time anyone managed to get such detailed images of the jets and their changing structure over time.

Two new species of predatory creatures with giant sabre teeth have been unearthed in Russia. The prehistoric animals belong to a group known as therapsids or “protomammals” that ruled the planet long before the first dinosaurs over 250 million years ago. These creatures would ultimately give rise to modern mammals, but they were largely wiped out by a massive extinction event at the end of the Permian era that made way for the age of the dinosaurs.

The search for habitable exoplanets spans far and wide, pushing the limits of what our modern telescopes are capable of. But rest assured that we aren’t ignoring what’s in our own backyard. Researchers have kept diligent eyes on Alpha Centauri, the closest system to Earth that happens to house Sun-like stars.

Scientists in China have discovered what they claim are the oldest fossilised animal footprints ever found. The parallel tracks were formed in mud up to 551 million years ago in southern China's Yangtze Gorges. They potentially date to 10 million years before the Cambrian Explosion, when arthropod and other animal life rapidly flourished, and when creatures with pairs of legs capable of leaving such footprints were thought to have arisen.

Scientists say they have found evidence of dunes of frozen methane on Pluto. The research, which is published in the journal Science, suggests that the distant world is more dynamic than previously thought. Pluto's atmosphere was believed to be too thin to create the features familiar in deserts on Earth.

Astronomers using cutting-edge skywatching devices have identified an extremely fast-growing black hole, cataloging it as a ‘monster’ that eats the mass equivalent of our sun every two days.

Scientists have produced the firmest evidence yet of so-called sterile neutrinos, mysterious particles that pass through matter without interacting with it at all. The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results.

NASA's Curiosity rover has found organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in ancient rocks on Mars, and discovered that methane on the Red Planet follows a seasonal cycle. Read our full story here! NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently found something intriguing on Mars, and the space agency will unveil the discovery today (June 7).

Two new solar systems, filled with their own worlds, have been found relatively close to our own. One of them is just 160 light years from Earth and includes three planets that are remarkably similar in size to our own. One of the three is exactly the same size as our own world, and the others are only ever so slightly bigger.

Every 405,000 years, gravitational tugs from Jupiter and Venus slightly elongate Earth’s orbit, an amazingly consistent pattern that has influenced our planet’s climate for at least 215 million years and allows scientists to more precisely date geological events like the spread of dinosaurs, according to a Rutgers-led study.

For the first time ever, archaeologists have been able to cast the complete figure of a horse that perished in the volcanic eruption at Pompeii. The "extraordinary" discovery was made outside the city walls, in Civita Giuliana to the north of Pompeii proper, the site's directors announced this week. Excavation in the area revealed what archaeologists identified as a stable, complete with the remains of a trough.

Australian scientists have discovered the fastest growing black hole known in the universe. It is growing at a rate of 1 per cent every 1 million years, and it is so big it is consuming a mass equivalent to our Sun every two days. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

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.

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).

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.

A 13-year-old boy and an amateur archaeologist have helped to uncover a unique stash of lost treasure thought to be associated with the legendary Danish King "Harry Bluetooth," who brought Christianity to Denmark in the 10th century.

More than 140 children were unearthed on the northern coast of Peru, in what may be the largest child sacrifice in history.

In a surprise discovery, an 11-year-old girl has discovered the fossil of a rare creature, one that proliferated and scoured the oceans hundreds of million years ago. Ryleigh Taylor was strolling along the shoreline of a lake in East Tennessee when she saw something strange lying on a rock. The structure appeared like a fossil, but she had no idea what it really was. So, she picked up the intriguing structure and returned home.

Helen Dooley admits that she often gets puzzled responses when she describes her work. "People say, ‘You bleed sharks for a living?’" That's an overstatement, but every couple of weeks she and a helper drop by several large fiberglass tanks at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology on the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland. They net a cat shark or nurse shark and wrestle it into a small pool of water that contains a mild sedative. The drug calms the shark so they can lift it from the water and puncture a vein in its tail.

An asteroid in Jupiter's orbit may have come from outside our Solar System, according to a new study. Unlike 'Oumuamua, the interstellar object which briefly visited the Solar System earlier this year, 2015 BZ509 (affectionately known as BZ) seems to have been here for 4.5 billion years. This makes it the first known interstellar asteroid to have taken up residence orbiting the Sun. It is not yet known where the object came from.

Starting about 7,000 years ago, something weird seems to have happened to men: Over the next two millennia, recent studies suggest, their genetic diversity –specifically, the diversity of their Y chromosomes – collapsed. So extreme was that collapse that it was as if there were only one man left to mate for every 17 women.

Found -- one lost continent, hiding underneath a tropical holiday destination. It might sound implausible, but deep at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, a research team, led by South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, has found pieces of an ancient continent. The lava-covered piece of continent, dubbed 'Mauritia,' was found under the popular island of Mauritius. According to the report published this week in the journal Nature Communications, the piece of crust is left over from the breakup of Gondwanaland...

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...

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.

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

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.