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Researchers at the Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa in southern Brazil have identified a previously unknown species of ancient marine bivalve from a fossil roughly 400 million years old, adding a new chapter to the story of life in the prehistoric seas that once covered much of South America. The newly named species, Actinopteria grahni, was recovered from rock layers belonging to the Devonian Period, long before dinosaurs walked the Earth.

The Roman Colosseum is among the most famous landmarks of Earth. Through the ages, the popular imagination has diminished this amphitheatre's history to the simple, stone-built bowl- an open arena where gladiators would fight as crowds booed.

Beneath forests, grasslands and even the soil in our gardens lies an extraordinary hidden world that most people never see. Scientists have now mapped a vast underground network of microscopic fungi stretching an estimated 110 quadrillion kilometres across Earth's topsoil, a distance so immense that it could reach the Sun nearly a billion times.

As darkness falls across much of the modern world, truly dark landscapes have become increasingly rare. Artificial light now reaches an estimated 23 per cent of the Earth's land surface between 75degN and 60degS, while the extent of illuminated areas continues to expand globally.

Chinese researchers have uncovered what is believed to be Earth's deepest and most extensive whale graveyard in the Indian Ocean, with fossils dating back 5.3 million years and ecosystems that may reshape understanding of deep-sea life.

A supermassive black hole located roughly three billion light-years from Earth is producing the fastest ultraviolet winds ever recorded. The object, known as J2318, powers a quasar whose outflows are travelling at approximately 30 per cent of the speed of light, or around 323 million kilometres per hour.

In 1983, a routine road construction project just outside Amman, Jordan, uncovered an extraordinary find. Workers digging into the earth broke into a buried pit, exposing a cache of humanlike plaster faces, preserved for millennia.

Scientists suggest Earth's earliest animals reproduced asexually, slowing evolution and delaying the biodiversity boom that transformed life.

Every year, the world generates hundreds of millions of tonnes of plastic waste, and the vast majority of it ends up in places where it is not useful. A landmark 2025 study published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, which conducted a global trade-linked material flow analysis of plastics for 2022, found that the global plastic recycling rate has remained stuck at just 9 per cent, with incineration now the dominant disposal method at 34 per cent and landfilling at 40 per cent.

A solar eruption that had sparked hopes of Northern Lights sightings in India failed to arrive as expected. Forecasters have now lowered storm expectations, raising questions about whether auroras will be visible at all.