Table of contents for Spring 2026 in Discover

BACTERIA, the earliest life on Earth, evolved around 4 billion years ago, with the first fossilized traces dating back approximately 3.7 billion to 3.5 billion years. But fossils alone only hint at the past. To truly understand the world’s long-lost microorganisms, scientists must obtain something much more fragile: their DNA. In a September 2025 study, a team of scientists recovered the oldest host-associated bacterial DNA ever found, extracted from mammoth tissues more than a million years old. Reported in Cell, the research identifies the microorganisms that lived inside these extinct megafauna, including the possible pathogens that infected them. “This work opens a new chapter in understanding the biology of extinct species,” said Love Dalén, a study author and professor at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, in a statement. “Not…

VIKINGS WERE undoubtedly masterful sailors, but they still needed safe places to relax and recover from the hazards of the seas. While the majority of Viking rest stops have been lost to time, however, that hasn’t stopped one researcher from retracing their forgotten routes. Greer Jarrett, an archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden, has spent several years trying to explain Viking seafaring. Having conducted his own sailing trials aboard boats tied to the Viking tradition, Jarrett has identified a series of small, sheltered ports that Vikings may have visited around 1,000 years ago. The discovery places a major piece of the puzzle when it comes to Viking travel and trade, showing where Vikings may have stopped as they ventured along the coast of Norway. “A lot of the time, we only…

In many ways, the Maya lived like the people in other past (and even modern-day) societies. They used nearby resources — like limestone and chert — to construct their cities and homes, engaged in sports, and enjoyed diets rich in corn. The Maya have been celebrated for their stunning architecture, realistic artistic expressions, and advanced understanding of astronomy and mathematics. For hundreds of years, they thrived in cities located in and around present-day Guatemala. Then, during a period starting in the 8th and 9th centuries, they began abandoning many of their southern sites — moving so abruptly that they left unfinished construction projects and inscriptions in their wake. This period, known as the Classic Maya Collapse, continues to fascinate archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike. “The overwhelming information was that there was…

Paul Hebert has always loved bugs. As a young boy, he’d spend endless hours collecting insects around his childhood home in Ontario, plying the forests for butterflies in the day, and shining lights outdoors to attract moths at night. “I was completely fascinated with biodiversity from the time I was a kid,” says Hebert, who amassed his boyhood collections inside the family home. “My parents were not perhaps happy with that.” Hebert’s entomological curiosity would help shape an academic career that included a Ph.D. in genetics and a professorship of biological sciences at the University of Windsor. In 1990, he moved to the University of Guelph to become chair of the department of zoology. For Hebert, work in molecular genetics and animal diversity strongly indicated that the number of undiscovered…

We tend to think of space as a vast, unlimited resource. The word itself evokes the notion of an unparalleled, unfillable, wide-open expanse. But while that might be true for outer space, most people don’t understand the sheer number of objects that are actually filling our local space — in orbit around Earth — right now. Elon Musk’s Starlink services alone employ around 9,400 satellites as of January 2026. And that’s just one company. That number doesn’t come close to including a multitude of other objects, all sent into orbit by businesses, researchers, or governments since the mid-20th century. Suffice it to say, it’s getting crowded up there — and overcrowding always has consequences. Joe Pelton, dean emeritus of the International Space University in France and co-author of a February…

Compelling evidence has suggested that humans first encountered Antarctica around 600 C.E., when Polynesian people likely stumbled upon the icy landmass. These findings, outlined in a 2021 paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, are based on careful study of the oral histories of the Māori and other related cultures, which describe encounters with a land to the south that almost certainly had to be Antarctica. Europeans came along several hundred years later, with explorers from many nations — the famous Captain Cook among them — searching for, but never quite finding, the actual Antarctic mainland. Antarctica’s “discovery” is usually noted as occurring around 1820 (although even the history books cannot agree on precisely which European spotted the continent first). One of the first reported…

IN THE ALASKAN wilderness, a strange symptom of climate change is emerging: The rivers are changing colors thanks to the thawing of the permafrost. According to a September 2025 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the warming soil has introduced iron and other metals into the Salmon River — a remote river in the Brooks Range — turning it orange. After sampling the river in August 2022, July 2023, and August 2023, the study authors concluded that the metal concentrations have surpassed the Environmental Protection Agency’s toxicity thresholds, posing a threat to the river’s inhabitants, including its salmon and freshwater fish. “The fingerprint of global warming is unmistakable,” said study author Tim Lyons, from the University of California, Riverside, in a statement about the transformation. “No…

HERE’S SOME good news: Our galaxy may not be destined to end in a violent collision with the Andromeda Galaxy as soon as previously thought. While earlier research regarded the collision as a virtual certainty within a few billion years, a June 2025 analysis in Nature Astronomy has called that assumption into question. The Andromeda Galaxy, a spiral galaxy around 2.5 million light-years away, is one of several galaxies, including the Milky Way, that comprise what is called the Local Group. Astronomers have long theorized that Andromeda is on a collision course with the Milky Way. And in 2012, data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope seemed to confirm the suspicion that the two galaxies would collide within a timeframe of around four billion years. But the June study, which involved new…

YOU MIGHT THINK that the way you breathe is ordinary — that there isn’t anything special in the way you inhale and exhale. But it turns out that your breathing is special, and might reveal more about you than you may think — from your body mass index (BMI) to your levels of anxiety. Comparing people’s highly particular breathing patterns to fingerprints, researchers have found that an individual can be identified by their personal “breath print” with almost 100 percent accuracy — or 96.8 percent, to be precise. Not only that; researchers have also found that subtle differences in these patterns can provide important information about an individual’s health status, not to mention their mood, cognition, and behavior. OUR BRAINS manage our breathing, and because our brains are unique, our…

MIRA WAS A 55-year-old nurse who was referred to me urgently by a fellow gastroenterologist. Mira worked in the operating room at a hospital across town and had been suffering from gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) for many years. She had taken over-the-counter and prescription anti-reflux medications to good effect but was tired of taking these pills twice a day, every day. She underwent evaluation at the hospital where she worked and was found to have a large hiatal hernia. These hernias, which are quite common — affecting as many as 1 in 4 adults — develop when part of the stomach slips through the normal gap in the diaphragm that the esophagus passes through. The herniated stomach takes up residence in the chest cavity, as opposed to the abdomen, where…

THE STELLER’S SEA COW BEGAN TO SWIM THE LENGTH OF THE GALLERY. AN ADORABLE BABY SEA COW SOON JOINED IN. THEY WERE HUGE BUT GRACEFUL, THE SOUND OF WAVES PULSING AS MOTHER AND CALF FROLICKED IN THE SEEMINGLY WET AIR. “Look closer / Regardez ici,” the sign at the Royal Ontario Museum encouraged. Who couldn’t help but look? Peering through a small hole on a black divider, the world became full of Carolina parakeets. The nearby information board explained that “the species was extinct by the 1930s,” but extinction had turned into abundance through that hole. Through mirror placement, one parakeet had transformed into a flock. There were parakeets as far as the eye could see — up, down, left, right. The parakeets went on forever. Extinction is rightfully talked…

Hot coffee fills your favorite mug as you sit down at the table, facing an empty seat. Your journal is open beside you, filled with notes and questions. You’re not waiting for a friend, but for someone you haven’t connected with in a long time — your younger self. What would they look like? What would they drink? How different are they from who you are now? Welcome to a new social media trend that blends reflection with a touch of therapy: “Coffee With My Younger Self” (CWMYS). The idea, popularized through short clips on TikTok and Instagram, offers a modern spin on narrative therapy. “I imagined sitting down with my 16-year-old-self, a version of me steeped in self-doubt, addiction, and perfectionism, only to reveal that our richest form of…

THE MOST RECOGNIZABLE part of a seahorse is its long, horse-like snout. But have you ever heard of the species that evolved its snout away? The pygmy seahorse (Hippocampus bargibanti) is a small species, measuring around the size of a thumbnail, that lacks the iconic face that other seahorses tend to share. Why this species lost its snout is simple. The loss helps the seahorse mimic its surroundings, mirroring the coral habitat that it calls home. But how this species lost its snout is much harder to explain, requiring a look into the animal’s genes. Sequencing the pygmy seahorse’s genome for the first time, a team of researchers has found that the loss of a gene shortened the species’ snout, helping it survive following its split from the other seahorses…

SCIENTISTS SAY THAT THE WORDS THAT STAND THE TEST OF TIME ARE ACQUIRED EARLY ON. THEY’RE ALSO CONCRETE AND EMOTIONALLY AROUSING. WORDS, LIKE BIOLOGICAL species, are engaged in what Charles Darwin called a “struggle for existence.” Some have what it takes, earning the right to roll off the next generation of tongues, while others are consigned to the pages of Merriam-Webster — or get forgotten entirely. What sets the survivors apart? In December 2023, an analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that many successful English words have three crucial traits: They’re acquired early in life; they refer to something concrete; and they’re emotionally arousing. (They offer “snake” and “fight” as two notable examples.) TO FIGURE THAT out, the authors of the analysis asked some 12,000…

What is Tulum known for? Well, anyone who’s ever heard of the place knows it as a buzzy resort, the trendier alternative to Cancun (80 miles to the north) and, for the past few decades, a popular (and crowded) destination for foodies, influencers, and tourists in general. But ancient people were settled in the area of Tulum long before it was cool. According to a 2020 study in PLOS One, skeletal remains found in nearby cenotes, or sinkholes, and underwater cave systems indicate that the area was populated by Indigenous people at least 10,000 years ago. Ancient people were settled in the area of Tulum long before it was cool. More recently, around 1,500 years ago, it was there, on the Caribbean coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, that the ancient…

ON APRIL 7, 2025, a 10-billion-dollar biotech company called Colossal Biosciences announced the births of Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi — three gray wolf pups with several of their genes modified to resemble those of the extinct dire wolf. Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi became poster pups for the de-extinction movement and were met with fame and celebrity — as well as frustration from some conservation scientists working to prevent extinctions among living species. For years, conservationists have warned that once a species is lost, there’s no coming back, that extinction is forever. But Colossal’s website proclaims in all-caps, “FOREVER IS TEMPORARY.” Even beyond de-extinction laboratories, technological developments are blurring the line between extinct and not. Camera traps, drones, wildlife-spotting apps, and even analyses of trace DNA in the water supply make…

GLIDING IN A CANOE over calm waters, surrounded by pelicans diving and fishing, you don’t feel like you’re in one of the world’s biggest cities. The greater metropolitan area of Mexico City is home to over 20 million people, but here in the Xochimilco wetlands in the south of the city, canals filled with fish, amphibians, and migratory birds are the remnants of what was once a massive lake. Centuries ago, this lake, called Lake Texcoco, covered all but the city’s center, then the bustling capital of Tenochtitlan. There, the Aztec civilization constructed massive pyramids and palaces — complexes connected by busy canals and causeways — as well as floating farms, or chinampas, which worked within the surrounding waters to produce an abundance of food. Mexico City’s lake system was drained…

The southern polar regions are a forbidding place for travelers, even in the 21st century. Antarctica’s harsh climate and thick ice coverage have made archaeological explorations — or explorations of any kind — exceptionally challenging. This has added a sense of mystery to various theories that ancient humans could once have occupied the continent. Scientists, however, have given a decidedly chilly reception to the prevailing hypotheses. Let’s go through them one-by-one. Did Piri Reis have some special knowledge of Antarctica that others lacked? PERHAPS THE OLDEST and most frequently cited piece of “evidence” for the possibility of an ancient civilization in Antarctica is the Piri Reis map, which was drawn by the eponymous Ottoman sailor and cartographer in 1513. The map illustrates a relatively accurate coastline of South America. It…