Creatures that bridged the gap between reptiles and mammals may have been bearing live young 90 million years earlier than we thought.

One of the hallmarks of all mammals apart from monotremes – echidnas and the platypus – is that they give birth to live young. This “viviparity” contrasts with the “oviparity” seen most other vertebrates, in which females lay eggs that hatch outside their bodies.

One long-standing question has been whether creatures known as cynodonts, which emerged around 260 million years ago during the Permian geological period and are directly ancestral to all mammals, laid eggs or gave birth to live young, as no evidence of their reproduction has been discovered either way.

“Whether mammalian ancestors were oviparous or viviparous has been considered a mystery,” says  at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council. “We had no clues on how or when one of the most distinctive traits of the majority of present-day mammals, viviparity, evolved in the mammalian lineage.”

This has now changed, thanks to a chance observation made during a postgraduate class at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. The students were examining a fossil of Chiniquodon theotonicus, a cynodont that lived 236 million years ago and was unearthed in the Talampaya National Park in north-western Argentina in 2011. Part of the analysis involved using a microscope to examine thin slices taken from one of the ancient animal’s leg bones. At that point, the class noticed a curious growth line inside the bone.

Gaetano and his colleagues investigated further and eventually concluded that this line, analogous to a tree’s growth ring, recorded the moment that the ancient mammal relative went through a growth spurt after its birth. 

The researchers reconstructed how large the leg bone and the animal itself would have been when the growth line formed. They calculated that the animal would have weighed 1.68 kilograms at that point. When the animal died as a full-grown adult, it was just shy of 12 kilograms.

This gave the researchers a ratio of newborn to adult size in the ancient animal. They then compared this figure to similar ratios obtained from a wide variety of modern animals: 1869 mammals, 2619 non-avian reptiles and 782 birds.

“We were amazed to find that ��󾱲Ծ���ܴǻ�Dz���grouped with extant placental mammals,” says Gaetano.

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Egg-laying animal groups produce young that are far smaller than adults when they hatch, he says.

For example, some species of large birds have newly hatched young that are just 0.002 per cent of adult body mass, whereas placental mammals often give birth to young that are over 20 per cent of the size of their parents.

“Only placental mammals produce relatively large newborns, whereas reptile and bird hatchlings are comparatively very small,” says Gaetano. “Hence, we propose that [the] Chiniquodon theotonicus reproductive strategy was most similar to that of placental mammals.”

 at the University of Bristol in the UK says the findings are convincing.

“Further, as they argue, the apparent absence or rarity of actual eggs of any kind in the Permian and Triassic has always been puzzling – the so-called amniote egg gap,” he says.

 at Macquarie University in Sydney says his gut reaction is to be sceptical of the claim of live birth, as we have only indirect evidence. But he is impressed that, in the absence of any direct fossil evidence, the team is still trying to solve the puzzle.

“We may never get any of the kind of direct evidence that solves the
mystery, for example a fossilised mammalian egg or a fossil mother during
pregnancy,” he says. “So it is kind of cool that they’re taking a different approach to trying to find an answer to that question.”

Three massive black holes have been discovered in a galaxy located in the early universe, 12.5 billion light years away. This has left astronomers surprised that such a complex system could have formed so soon after the big bang.

“This system is in the very, very early universe,” says at the University of Sydney, who wasn’t involved in the discovery. “So, how have we ended up in a situation where these three supermassive black holes have formed and come close together in only a billion years or so since the big bang?”

In December 2024, at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and her colleagues were observing a galaxy known as J0148-4214 through the James Webb Space Telescope when they saw something strange.

At 12.5 billion light years’ distance, the team observed the galaxy as it looked around 1.2 billion years after the big bang, says Übler. “We [also] quickly noticed that the central emission profile of the galaxy had a peculiar shape,” she says.

An analysis revealed two separate regions of high-velocity hydrogen gas in the centre of the galaxy, indicating two so-called accreting black holes that were separated by about 620 light years – a hop, skip and a jump in cosmic terms.

An accreting black hole is a super dense area of space, so compressed that light can’t escape, but that continuously drags in surrounding gas, dust and even stars. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has just one massive black hole at the core of its spiral arms.

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“During examination of the whole galaxy, we also noticed another region in the galaxy outskirts with high-velocity hydrogen gas, indicating another, third growing black hole,” says Übler. This one is more than 5500 light years away from the other two.

“We have explored several alternatives ranging from a single black hole to supernovae, shocks, winds and massive stars, but these were all unsatisfactory or incompatible based on our data and previous observations of this system,” she says.

Until now, there was no evidence that massive black hole triplets existed within the first 1.2 billion years of cosmic history, says Übler. “This discovery shows us that processes in the early universe were efficient at bringing massive black holes together,” she says. “It also suggests that black hole merging may have been an additional, fast route for their rapid growth in the early universe.”

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at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, says that based on the information the researchers have presented, she agrees with their conclusion. “The fingerprints look like black holes and the ‘shape’ is best explained with two separate ones,” she says. “The third black hole is better separated, so it is a much cleaner result. Maybe it is falling into the galaxy for the first time, or maybe it has been ejected by interactions with the other two.”

Having three black holes in close vicinity and in a single system suggests there has recently been a merger of separate galactic entities, says Foster. But she says other interpretations may arise in the future, as more observations of the galaxy are made.

Dobie says that a triple black hole system “seems to be the most promising interpretation of the data that they’re seeing”. He also suspects that as more telescopes come online and technology advances, more such galaxies will be found.

The clearest images ever taken of the sun’s surface reveal striking wave patterns, reminiscent of those sometimes seen in clouds on Earth. Analysis of the patterns may improve our predictions of solar weather.

On 14 April 2025, with just a few minutes of their allotted time remaining at the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and with clouds fast closing in that would force the closure of the observatory’s lens cover, a team of astronomers collected a series of extraordinary images – the most detailed ever recorded of the sun’s surface, known as the photosphere.

Most remarkably, the images revealed, for the first time, wave-shaped vortices known as Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities (KHI) that had long been predicted to exist on the sun but had never before been observed.

“These swirling, vortex-like patterns are universal, appearing in cloud formations, ocean currents and across the cosmos,” says team member  at the National Solar Observatory in Colorado.

“A famous example is [Vincent] van Gogh’s The Starry Night, where the sky’s vortex structures closely resemble turbulent KHI structures,” he says. “A similar parallel appears in Hokusai’s famous woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, where the curling crests of the wave echo the iconic shape of KHI billows.”

Another member of the team, , also at the National Solar Observatory, says that while the existence of some KHI in the solar photosphere was expected, it was a surprise to see the patterns “everywhere” in the images they processed.

The scale of what they were seeing was extraordinary – the telescope is 150 million kilometres from the sun, but it could pick out objects just a few tens of kilometres in length on its surface.

“Detecting and following the development of the 25 kilometre-size KHI vortices on the sun and identifying them as such is similar to identifying and tracking the motion of an average-sized ant on the ground from 160 km away,” says Wöger.

The KHI wave structures are formed on the boundaries of what the researchers describe as “granules”, structures between 500 and 2000 km in diameter, which are cells of rising plasma emerging from deep within the sun. The granules observed in the study were either close to a sunspot – a dark patch where magnetism blocks the escape of heat – or to one of numerous smaller sunspots called pores.

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The researchers think the KHI waves play a critical role in the dissipation and movement of heat. They may also influence the magnetic fields that drive coronal flares and other solar weather that can affect life on Earth and disrupt electromagnetic devices.

Wöger says the sun’s magnetic field is potentially impacted by KHI everywhere across its surface.

“To better understand and eventually forecast the sun’s most disruptive behaviours, we first have to understand the tiny physical processes that drive it,” he says. “This discovery reveals one of those processes for the first time at a level of detail we have not seen before.”

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 at the University of Sydney says that not only were the astronomers observing the sun at a finer scale than ever seen before, but they captured “something that looks incredible”.

“You zoom in, and you zoom in, and you zoom in, and then you see fundamental physics at the scale of 19 km – that’s just amazing,” says Wheatland.

He agrees that the discovery may help with understanding solar weather. 

“One of the outstanding problems in solar astrophysics is coronal heating,” he says. “It’s possible that Kelvin–Helmholtz instability is contributing to that.”

More than 150 years after Charles Darwin proposed that saxifrages were a group of plants that practiced carnivory, researchers have meticulously gathered the evidence to confirm he was right.

“Talk about an amazing feeling,” says at the University of Florida. “To have the opportunity to confirm a prediction of Darwin is both humbling and very exciting.

“I would like to think Darwin would be pleased [and say] ‘I was right – again.’”

To formally qualify as a carnivorous plant, a species must possess adaptations that enable it to attract, capture and digest its prey and absorb nutrients from it. Perhaps the world’s most renowned carnivorous plant is the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula).

In 1875, four years after detailing his theory of natural selection in his book On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote about in the genus Saxifraga, which were known to catch insects.

The genus has around 450 species and is found in Arctic and alpine regions of the northern hemisphere as well as in the South American Andes.

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However, despite attempting several experiments to prove the plants digested the insects, Darwin was unable to substantiate his hunch.

To take up the challenge, Soltis and his colleagues studied specimens of Saxifraga candelabrum from Wufeng Mountain in Yunnan province, China – a different species from those studied by Darwin, but in the same genus.

During field surveys, the botanists observed that the Saxifraga candelabrum plants were capable of trapping small insects, using hairs covered with a sticky secretion. Bigger insects – those more useful to the plants for pollination – weren’t captured by the goo.

Mature plants had an average of more than 70 insects stuck to them, primarily various species of gnat, which suggested a potential carnivorous habit, says team member at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The team first tested whether the secretions produced by the hair-like structures that trap insects contained digestive enzymes capable of breaking down the prey, and found they did.

Next, by infusing insect prey with a nitrogen isotope, the scientists were able to demonstrate that nutrients from the digested insect had been taken up by the plant.

Finally, genetic studies showed that Saxifraga shares common genes with other carnivorous plants – a sundew (Drosera spatulata) and a flycatcher bush (Roridula gorgonias) – that control prey attraction, digestion and nutrient uptake.

“Together, these genomic data provide independent evidence that S. candelabrum is a true carnivorous plant,” says Sun.

Soltis expects the team’s research will lead to a re-examination of other species in the genus, including the ones Darwin studied, and the wider Saxifraga family.

“Many members of the family have these hairs, and I would not be surprised if others are also carnivorous,” Soltis says.

DNA samples collected from Inca mummies have confirmed the presence of a strain of smallpox that first emerged in Europe.

“We interpreted this as the first direct molecular evidence of smallpox introduction into the Americas through European colonisation,” says at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Smallpox was the scourge of humanity for centuries until its eradication in the 1980s, through vaccination, from all but a few high-security medical laboratories. Severe strains of the virus had a mortality rate of up to a third and left survivors with scars from the blisters and scabs that cover the skin and fill with pus.

The disease was particularly brutal in parts of the world colonised by Europeans, such as and the Americas, where Indigenous populations had no natural immunity, resulting in millions of deaths.

In the Americas, historical reports record that smallpox began devastating Indigenous communities in the early 16th century, after the arrival of European colonists.

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at the University of Dundee in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the new research, says the waves of epidemics, including smallpox, that spread across the Americas were some of the most important events in history. “These diseases killed perhaps 95 per cent of the Indigenous population of the Americas and allowed for European colonisation,” he says.

Nakagome and his colleagues studied samples of bone from mummies found at an archaeological site known as Camarones 9 in northern Chile, discovered in 1957. Over subsequent decades, 41 mummified bodies wrapped in blankets and buried with grave goods were recovered from the site.

“While the original aim was to study the human DNA, we also searched for DNA from ancient pathogens,” says Nakagome. “That is when we discovered fragments matching the smallpox virus in two individuals.”

The first was a woman who was 30 to 35 years old at the time of death, and the second, an 18-to-20-year-old man, was revealed by carbon dating to have died between 1492 and 1631.

By reconstructing the virus’s genomes and comparing them with other ancient and modern smallpox viruses, the team found that they belonged to a lineage of smallpox that includes early medieval and early modern European strains.

The discovery adds weight to the possibility that small skin lesions on the trunks of the mummies, previously attributed to chronic arsenic exposure, may in fact have been the distinctive pustules that scar the skin of smallpox victims.

“This finding allowed us to identify a small group of people impacted by the virus for which no historical record exists,” says team member at the University of Chile in Santiago. Before the new research, the pathogen was known only from historical accounts of large-scale outbreaks, she says.

The work was particularly sensitive because of the disturbance of the original remains and the loss of material during analysis, both considered extremely controversial subjects to Indigenous people and the scientific community. “We never forget that behind every DNA extraction is a person, not a data point,” says de la Fuente Castro.

Ward welcomed the new research. “Understanding exactly what was killing native peoples and why they were so susceptible to epidemic disease is a vitally important issue,” he says.

Historians are now trying to understand how Europeans deliberately or inadvertently fuelled the spread of epidemics like smallpox, he says. “Without these epidemics, colonisation of the Americas would have been very different.”

A tiny, long-necked marine predator that lived 245 million years ago is the oldest reptile ever found with an intact digestive system.

The exquisitely preserved fossil, including almost the entire skeleton as well as the stomach, liver and intestines, was found in Yunnan province in China in 2023 and is named Austronaga minuta.

Even blood vessels and the scales of a partially digested fish meal are visible in the remains.

“A fossil this age with such clear preservation of its organs is really a world treasure,” says at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Austronaga dates back to the Triassic Period, when dinosaurs first evolved, but it isn’t a dinosaur. It belongs to a broader group called archosaurs, which includes dinosaurs, birds and crocodiles, but not other famous marine reptiles like mosasaurs or ichthyosaurs.

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The archosaurs were incredibly diverse in the Triassic and included “all kinds of interesting and strange-looking reptiles”, says at the Natural History Museum Stuttgart, Germany, a member of the team that analysed the fossil. Only later, during the Jurassic and beyond, did they become more restricted, mostly being limited to dinosaurs, including birds, and crocodiles.

This specimen is a mere 60 centimetres in length, but as it is the only known example and the reptile’s age at death is unknown, it is impossible to say whether the species grew larger, says Spiekman.

However, he is confident that it was unlikely to have reached the size of its very long relative Dinocephalosaurus, the “Chinese sea dragon”, which could easily grow to over 4 metres.

“This was certainly a good and agile swimmer, mainly using its tail for swimming, its long front flippers for steering and its long neck to catch fish,” says Spiekman. “A�ܲ��ٰ��DzԲ����� probably would have looked a little like a lizard or a croc trying to be a seal or an otter and likely would have had scaly skin, for example.”

The fossil shows that the basic plan of the reptilian digestive tract has changed little in 245 million years, he says, and the “straight and simple intestines is what we see in most modern predatory reptiles, including those eating fish”.

Although the fossil is of high quality, the internal organs of Austronaga are only preserved in two dimensions. This is unlike those of a 380-million-year-old fossil of an armoured fish that Long and his colleagues , which is regarded as having the oldest known organs of any vertebrate.

“But this is still an incredibly well-preserved fossil,” he says.

Most people have experienced the disorientation of waking up and not knowing where they are.

So, imagine how it must be to open your eyes in a location that rivals anything conjured in a dream: the inside of the tiny Orion capsule where you are a member of an Artemis crew. Oh, and also, the moon outside is disconcertingly large.

No wonder then that, since the earliest days of space travel, careful thought has had to be given to how Mission Control awakens its crews. It also explains why the default alarm on a smartphone, brutal and devoid of anything pleasant, would probably be a bad idea.

The first known wake-up song played to astronauts was a (Hello Wally, sung by Jack Jones) to the Gemini 6 crew, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, in December 1965.

And so a tradition was born. There is now a music played to astronauts spanning decades of the parallel journeys of the space age and modern musical era. Many of the entries are spectacular but cliched songs like Elton John’s Rocket Man, David Bowie’s Space Oddity or Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me.

But some are genuine surprises such as at least two appearances of Hawaiian War Chant, which, in spite of its name, would be surprisingly good to wake up to.

In the months since the world was captivated by Artemis II and its eminently lovable, relatable and inspiringly normal crew, I am still finding myself playing songs from their wake-up playlist, uploaded by .

One is even on high rotation as I walk my dog or do the dishes: In a Daydream by the Freddy Jones Band, which released the song in 1993. The Artemis II crew woke up to it on day three of their mission this year.

“When I wrote ‘In a Daydream,’ I was looking out a window on a rainy day in South Bend, imagining something beautiful,” says band member Marty Lloyd in a note accompanying a newly released of the piece. “Now, decades later, astronauts are listening to the song while looking out their windows at the beauty of space and Earth. It’s surreal how it’s all come full circle.”

I think the reason I enjoy the Artemis II playlist so much is that it says more about the crew as people, than them as astronauts. It was their partners and children, as well as they themselves, who chose the songs, and so classic astronaut hits on previous missions like Gonna Fly Now from the original Rocky and Come Fly With Me do not get a look in.

Instead, we get whimsy and youth and a sense of people who enjoy the same kind of music as us – the kind of regular humans who to work. I think the success of the mission is that the four astronauts made humanity feel like we, too, could be in that capsule.

Artemis II showed not just that we can aspire to great explorations but also that the best human endeavours begin with waking up better.