Chess is a relatively simple game to learn but a very difficult one to master. Because the starting positions of the pieces are fixed, top players have relied on memorizing the "best" opening moves, which can sometimes result in boring, predictable games. To encourage more creative play and move away from pure memory, former world champion Bobby Fischer proposed Chess960 in the 1990s.

In the shallow waters of the Florida Keys, juvenile Caribbean spiny lobsters are unwittingly meeting their doom by stumbling into naturally occurring ecological traps, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Antarctic icefish are famous for living without red blood cells, but they are not alone. A species of needle-shaped, warm-water fish called the Asian noodlefish also lacks hemoglobin and red blood cells. Like icefish, its veins are filled with translucent white blood, said H. William Detrich, professor emeritus of marine and environmental sciences, who collaborated with Chinese scientists on a paper about the strange aquatic creatures published in Current Biology.

While most planets that we are familiar with stick relatively close to their host star in a predictable orbit, some planets seem to have been knocked out of their orbits, floating through space free of any particular gravitational attachments. Astronomers refer to these lonely planets as "free-floating" or "rogue" planets.

Quantum particles have a social life, of a sort. They interact and form relationships with each other, and one of the most important features of a quantum particle is whether it is an introvert—a fermion—or an extrovert—a boson.

The protein p53, best known as the "guardian of the genome" for its role in preventing cancer, can affect blood vessels in different ways. However, it has not been clear how p53 can slow blood vessel growth in some cases and damage blood vessels in others.

Every day, millions of people use thermal paper without thinking about it. Receipts, shipping labels, tickets, and medical records all rely on heat‑sensitive coatings to make text appear. More specifically, heat triggers a reaction between a colorless dye and a "developer," producing dark text where the paper is warmed.

For the first time, scientists have reconstructed the ancient genomes of human betaherpesvirus 6A and 6B (HHV-6A/B) from archaeological human remains more than two millennia old. The study, led by the University of Vienna and University of Tartu (Estonia) and published in Science Advances, confirms that these viruses have been evolving with and within humans since at least the Iron Age. The findings trace the long history of HHV-6 integration into human chromosomes and suggest that HHV-6A lost this ability early on.

In recent decades, scientists have debated whether a seven-million-year-old fossil was bipedal—a trait that would make it the oldest human ancestor. A new analysis by a team of anthropologists offers powerful evidence that Sahelanthropus tchadensis—a species discovered in the early 2000s—was indeed bipedal by uncovering a feature found only in bipedal hominins.

Angiosperms, also known as flowering plants, represent the most diverse group of seed plants, and their origin and evolution have long been a central question in plant evolutionary biology. Whole-genome duplication (WGD), or polyploidization, is widely recognized as a key driver of the origin and trait evolution of both seed plants and angiosperms.