ScienceDaily: All - May 24, 2025

Today's top research news

Why are some rocks on the moon highly magnetic?

Scientists may have solved the mystery of why the moon shows ancient signs of magnetism although it has no magnetic field today. An impact, such as from a large asteroid, could have generated a cloud of ionized particles that briefly enveloped the moon and amplified its weak magnetic field.

vitastronomy/Shutterstock.com

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'Hopelessly attached': Scientists discover new 2D material that sticks the landing

Researchers have discovered a new 2D material, confirming decade-old prediction.

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Assembly instructions for enzymes

In biology, enzymes have evolved over millions of years to drive chemical reactions. Scientists have now derived universal rules to enable the de novo design of optimal enzymes. As an example, they considered the enzymatic reaction of breaking a dimer into two monomer molecules. Considering the geometry of such an enzyme-substrate-complex, they identified three golden rules that should be considered to build a functional enzyme.

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Mystery of 'very odd' elasmosaur finally solved: fiercely predatory marine reptile is new species

A group of fossils of elasmosaurs -- some of the most famous in North America -- have just been formally identified as belonging to a 'very odd' new genus of the sea monster, unlike any previously known. This primitive 85-million-year-old, 12 meter-long, fiercely predatory marine reptile is unlike any elasmosaur known to-date and hunted its prey from above.

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Earliest use of psychoactive and medicinal plant 'harmal' identified in Iron Age Arabia

A new study uses metabolic profiling to uncover ancient knowledge systems behind therapeutic and psychoactive plant use in ancient Arabia.

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Different phases of evolution during ice age

Cold-adapted animals started to evolve 2.6 million years ago when the permanent ice at the poles became more prevalent. There followed a time when the continental ice sheets expanded and contracted and around 700,000 years ago the cold periods doubled in length. This is when many of the current cold-adapted species, as well as extinct ones like mammoths, evolved.