Weekly Headlines (Excerpts)

1. Tree rings from ancient coffins offer clues to Earth’s past

Wood from gravesites can help reconstruct historic temperatures, floods, and droughts

30 Oct 2025  By Taylor Mitchell Brown 

2. Chemical additive slashes carbon emissions when creating synthetic fuels

Advance in Fischer-Tropsch process could make coal-to-liquid plants cleaner

30 Oct 2025  By Robert F. Service 

3. Can AI capture the mind-boggling complexity of a human cell?

Researchers are competing to make “virtual cells” that could transform biomedicine by predicting gene activity and more

30 Oct 2025  By Mitch Leslie 

4. New evidence? No problem. Chimps can weigh conflicting clues, just like humans

Study is first to suggest our closest relatives think about their own thoughts

30 Oct 2025  By Cathleen O’Grady 

5. How one of the world’s rarest and most valuable gemstones gets its vivid colors

Scientists finally solve mystery of ammolite’s brilliant reds, greens, and blues

30 Oct 2025  By Phie Jacobs 

6. Mini-tyrannosaur lived alongside T. rex, extraordinary fossil confirms

Study finds fresh evidence for Nanotyrannus, a dinosaur whose existence has long been debated

30 Oct 2025  By Jack Tamisiea 

7. Vaccine protects people from paratyphoid fever in a ‘human challenge’ study

Volunteers who swallowed disease-causing bacteria were less likely to get sick after an oral vaccine

29 Oct 2025  By Martin Enserink 

8. Aquarium hijinks provide strongest evidence yet that sharks love to play

Study hints at a deeper intelligence—and a need for enrichment in captivity

29 Oct 2025  By Christa Lesté-Lasserre 

9. To thwart food poisoning, tiny needles could inject bacteria-slaying viruses into your meal

Experimental patches on meat, fruits, and vegetables can destroy up to 99.9% of bacteria

29 Oct 2025  By Celina Zhao 

10 Alien worlds may be able to make their own water

Ocean planets could arise from rocks reacting with thick hydrogen atmospheres, lab experiments show

29 Oct 2025  By Robin George Andrews 

11. Innovative antivenom is a ‘potential game changer’ for snakebites

Synthetic cocktail of llama and alpaca “nanobodies” protected mice from venoms of 17 snakes

29 Oct 2025  By Christie Wilcox 

12. AI hallucinates because it’s trained to fake answers it doesn’t know

Teaching chatbots to say “I don’t know” could curb hallucinations. It could also break AI’s business model

28 Oct 2025  By Celina Zhao 

13. Man’s pig kidney fails just shy of setting record

The xenotransplant, from a gene-edited pig, had survived for nearly 9 months in Tim Andrews

27 Oct 2025  By Jon Cohen