Research, climate, nature and space, from the papers and agencies themselves.
Carbon dioxide reached 426.8 ppm in 2025, with methane and nitrous oxide also at records, the WMO said in its annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, released ahead of the COP31 climate talks.
A Nature study uses ancient proteins to identify two fossils from Xujiayao in northern China as Denisovan and proposes a shared set of skull traits for the extinct human group.
Japan's MMX spacecraft lifted off on an H3 rocket on October 20 to orbit the Martian moon Phobos, land on it twice and return more than 10 grams of its surface to Earth in 2031.
An IUCN reassessment of 892 reef-building coral species found 44% of those with enough data are threatened with extinction, up from about a third in 2008, with ocean warming the main driver.
Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin–Madison won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for the IceCube detector at the South Pole and its discovery of high-energy neutrinos from space.
