Somewhere on the dusty, wind-scoured surface of Mars, a robot the size of a small car has been quietly rewriting the story of the Red Planet. NASA's Curiosity rover — now in its fourteenth year on Mars — has just delivered what may be its most tantalizing discovery yet: the richest and most diverse collection of organic molecules ever found on another world. Published this month in Nature Communications, the study reveals that a single rock sample drilled from the floor of Gale Crater...

For decades, the story of human origins followed a simple, elegant script: somewhere in East Africa, a single population of early humans gave rise to every person alive today. It was a tidy narrative — one origin, one homeland, one lineage branching outward across the globe. But a sweeping new genetic analysis, highlighted this week by Nature and ScienceDaily, is tearing that script apart — and replacing it with something far more complex, surprising, and beautiful.

We know of four fundamental forces that govern everything in the universe — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Together, they explain how planets orbit stars, how atoms hold together, and how the Sun shines. But what if there is a fifth one, lurking just beyond the reach of our instruments, hiding in plain sight within our own solar system? A new study published in Physical Review D by Slava Turyshev, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),...