Discover Magazine

More than 40 years ago, British citizens watched as a train pummeled into a flask built to hold radioactive material. Discover what this experiment proved about transporting nuclear materials by train.

A skull fragment recovered from a hillside in central Spain may have belonged to someone young, a teenager or young adult, based on signs of ongoing bone development. The person lived during the second half of the Middle Pleistocene, in a region that has produced few human fossils from that era. The partial parietal bone, labeled RVH-1, is the first cranial remain recovered from Ruidera, a site in Ciudad Real where researchers are piecing together the history of early humans in inland Iberia.

A zombie outbreak has made its way across parts of the Amazon, but the zombies in question aren’t humans. They’re insects. As if the rainforests’ creepy crawlies couldn’t get any creepier, they’re being zombified by a fungus that basically takes over their whole body. The nightmarish fungus doesn’t just corrupt insects, either — it may also live inside plants, too.

Alongside Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, human genomes preserve traces of two other relatives no one can identify. Neither has a sequenced genome or a confirmed fossil, and part of one may be sitting in your DNA. Researchers call one the "ghost" lineage. A new study found one of its signals in a region containing FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language. Very little Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA has been found there, so the region often seemed distinctly modern human.

Learn how female brains undergo unique changes while recovering from ketamine, a discovery that could help improve future psychiatric treatments.

Missed some of our top stories from the week? Check out our round-up below, covering the biggest science news and stories that matter.

A woman in her early 30s and a young man around 20 were naturally mummified and buried in bundles in northern Chile. When researchers sampled their remains centuries later, they were looking for human DNA, not disease. Yet fragments of each person’s thigh bone held nearly identical traces of smallpox. The two Indigenous people were buried at Camarones 9, a site used during the Inca and early colonial periods. A study published in Science reports that they likely lived between 1492 and 1631.

Learn about a 30-million-year-old dog that climbed and ambushed prey, but lacked the ability to run for long distances like many modern dogs. Written byJack Knudson Jul 30, 2026, 10:02 PM | 3 min read Anne Kort of the Museum of Paleontology and a Michigan Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar at an excavation site.

Melatonin has become a go-to for both children and adults who have trouble sleeping. According to theSleep Foundation, nearly half of all adults have used the sleep aid to fall asleep, and 39 percent say they take it every day. In all, 46 percent of parents report giving melatonin to their children to help them fall asleep. But when it comes to long-term use, the data is sparse. Is it safe to take it to sleep, and if so, for how long? And what do we know about children and melatonin use?

Only days after record-low water exposed decades-old shipwrecks along the Danube, the same river has given up something older, hundreds of miles downstream in Bulgaria. A resident near the Bulgarian village of Ryahovo spotted large bones along the Danube riverbank. They photographed the remains and sent the images to local officials.