Pure Science

Ars Technica

When you compare SpaceX to the world's other space enterprises, it's probably easier to list the things SpaceX hasn't done instead of reciting all of the company's achievements. One of these is the launch of nuclear materials. SpaceX has...

Ars Technica

Demonstrating lollipop user interface to simulate taste in virtual and augmented reality environments. Credit: Lu et al, 2024/PNAS Demonstrating lollipop user interface to simulate taste in virtual and augmented reality...

Ars Technica

Federal agents briefly detained infamous ex-hospital CEO Ralph de la Torre early last week and seized his phone, according to an investigative report from the Boston Globe. De la Torre is the ultra-wealthy former CEO of the now-bankrupt...

Ars Technica

Bird flu virus has been found in a batch of raw—unpasteurized—milk sold in California, prompting a recall issued at the state's request, health officials announced over the weekend. No illnesses have yet been linked to the contaminated...

Ars Technica

The world’s most important climate talks were pulled back from the brink of collapse after poorer countries reluctantly accepted a finance package of “at least” $300 billion a year from wealthy nations after bitter negotiations. Fears...

Ars Technica

Neutrinos are some of nature’s most elusive particles. One hundred trillion fly through your body every second, but each one has only a tiny chance of jostling one of your atoms, a consequence of the incredible weakness of the weak nuclear...

Ars Technica

It should have been a routine mission to ferry about three tons of food, fuel, and supplies to the International Space Station, but when Russian cosmonauts opened the hatch to a cargo spacecraft on Saturday, they got a surprise—a toxic...

Ars Technica

In the wee hours of December 26, 2004, a massive 9.2 earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean, generating an equally massive tsunami that caused unprecedented devastation to 14 countries and killing more than 230,000. Twenty years later,...

Ars Technica

Beliefs are convictions of reality that we accept as true. They provide us with the basic mental scaffolding to understand and engage meaningfully in our world. Beliefs remain fundamental to our behavior and identity but are not well...

Ars Technica

“If we go back to the early 1900s, this is when the idea was first proposed that memories are physically stored in some location within the brain,” says Michael R. Williamson, a researcher at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. For...

Ars Technica

On the eve of the rise of the Maya civilization, people living in what’s now Belize turned a whole wetland into a giant network of fish traps big enough to feed thousands of people. We already know that the Maya turned swamps into...

Ars Technica

Physicists including Robert H. Dickle and Fred Hoyle have argued that we are living in a universe that is perfectly fine-tuned for life. Following the anthropic principle, they claimed that the only reason fundamental physical constants...

Ars Technica

It would be easy to be cynical about a German-French startup named The Exploration Company, which aims to build an increasingly sophisticated lineup of spaceships that could one day launch astronauts into orbit. After all, European space...

Ars Technica

Two days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a change in the country's policy for employing nuclear weapons in conflict. Then, on Thursday, Russia attacked the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with a new type of ballistic missile...

Ars Technica

Welcome to Edition 7.20 of the Rocket Report! This is a super-long version of the newsletter because we did not publish last week, and there is just a ton of launch news of late. Also, I want to note that next week's report will appear a...

Ars Technica

After a month of unexplained bouts of stomach pain, an otherwise healthy 16-year-old girl arrived at the emergency department of Massachusetts General Hospital actively retching and in severe pain. A CT scan showed nothing unusual in her...

Ars Technica

The duck-billed dinosaur Parasaurolophus is distinctive for its prominent crest, which some scientists have suggested served as a kind of resonating chamber to produce low-frequency sounds. Nobody really knows what Parasaurolophus sounded...

Ars Technica

The Space Launch System rocket that will dispatch four astronauts on the first Moon mission in more than 50 years passed a major milestone Wednesday. NASA said ground teams inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center...

Ars Technica

The US Capitol building in Washington, DC, is adorned with multiple lavish murals created in the 19th century by Italian artist Constantino Brumidi. These include panels in the Senate first-floor corridors, Room H-144, and the rotunda. The...

Ars Technica

On May 7, 2011, Georgia resident Tonya Brand noticed a pain on the inside of her right thigh. As the pain grew worse in the 4- to 5-inch area of her leg, she headed to a hospital. There, doctors suspected she had a blood clot. But an...

Ars Technica

We're nearing the end of the year, and there are typically a flood of announcements regarding quantum computers around now, in part because some companies want to live up to promised schedules. Most of these involve evolutionary...

Ars Technica

A day after SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the sixth time, the company received good news from the Federal Aviation Administration regarding future launch operations from its Starbase facility in South Texas. In a draft version of...

Ars Technica

Archaeologists have discovered numerous ceramic or clay whistles at Aztec sites, dubbed "death whistles" because of their distinctive skull shapes. A new paper published in the journal Communications Psychology examines the acoustical...

Ars Technica

An egg is an amazing thing, culinarily speaking: delicious, nutritious and versatile. Americans eat nearly 100 billion of them every year, almost 300 per person. But eggs, while greener than other animal food sources, have a bigger...

Ars Technica

SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for a even larger, upgraded vehicle to debut on the next test flight. The world's biggest...

Ars Technica

In September, Microsoft made an unusual combination of announcements. It demonstrated progress with quantum error correction, something that will be needed for the technology to move much beyond the interesting demo phase, using hardware...

Ars Technica

University of Rochester physicist Ranga Dias made headlines with his controversial claims of high-temperature superconductivity—and made headlines again when the two papers reporting the breakthroughs were later retracted under suspicion...

Ars Technica

Patients in China will be able to purchase the blockbuster weight-loss drug Wegovy for 1,400 yuan, or about $193, just a fraction of the US list price of $1,349, according to media reports. The price in China is in line with pricing...

Ars Technica

The sixth flight of SpaceX's giant Starship rocket, set for takeoff on Tuesday from South Texas, will test the vehicle's limits in new ways. Most importantly, SpaceX will attempt to briefly reignite one of Starship's six Raptor engines in...

Ars Technica

Spooky season has come and gone, but those Halloween revelers who took in a haunted house during the season might just have boosted their immune systems by doing so, according to a new paper published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and...

Ars Technica

Emergent gravity is a bold idea. It claims that the force of gravity is a mere illusion, more akin to friction or heat—a property that emerges from some deeper physical interaction. This emergent gravity idea might hold the key to...

Ars Technica

Scientists could win back trust lost during the COVID-19 pandemic if they just showed a little intellectual humility, according to a study published Monday in Nature Human Behavior. It's no secret that scientists—and the science...

Ars Technica

Officials from NASA and Russia’s space agency don’t see eye to eye on the causes and risks of small but persistent air leaks on the International Space Station. That was the word from the new chair of NASA's International Space Station...

Ars Technica

Twelve-thousand years ago, people in a coastal village in the Levant used stone weights on their spindles to spin thread faster and more evenly—and, some archeologists are arguing, in the process they pioneered the basic mechanics that...

Ars Technica

Few people are fond of earwigs, with their menacing abdominal pincers—whether they’re skittering across your floor, getting comfy in the folds of your camping tent, or minding their own business. Scientists, too, have given them short...

Ars Technica

Last year we reported on preliminary research suggesting that ancient Egyptians may have used hallucinogens in their religious rituals, based on the presence of a few key chemical signatures taken from a ceremonial mug. Now those...

Ars Technica

As SpaceX made its final preparations for the sixth launch of its Starship rocket, the company's chief operating officer and president spoke at a financial conference on Friday about various topics, including the future of the massive...

Ars Technica

SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites are responsible for more and more public reports of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAPs), but most recent cases remain unsolved, according to a US government report released Thursday. Starlinks often...

Ars Technica

A 7-year-old launch company that has yet to have a rocket successfully lift off announced a radical pivot on Thursday. Its new plan? Focusing on missile defense. The founder and president of ABL Space Systems, Dan Piemont, announced the...

Ars Technica

Without question, inactivity is bad for us. Prolonged sitting is consistently linked to higher risks of cardiovascular disease and death. The obvious response to this frightful fate is to not sit— move. Even a few moments of exercise can...

Ars Technica

There's a general consensus that we won't be able to consistently perform sophisticated quantum calculations without the development of error-corrected quantum computing, which is unlikely to arrive until the end of the decade. It's still...

Ars Technica

By now, it has been firmly established that the Earth went through a series of global glaciations around 600 million to 700 million years ago, shortly before complex animal life exploded in the Cambrian. Climate models have confirmed that,...

Ars Technica

Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based company resurrected from bankruptcy, is riding high these days. In a few months, Firefly will attempt to become the second company to safely place a commercial lander on the Moon. Firefly's Alpha rocket has...

Ars Technica

A British Columbia teen who contracted Canada's first known human case of H5 bird flu has deteriorated swiftly in recent days and is now in critical condition, health officials reported Tuesday. The teen's case was announced Saturday by...

Ars Technica

In 1971, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a notorious experiment in which he randomly divided college students into two groups, guards and prisoners, and set them loose in a simulated prison environment for six...

Ars Technica

Mary the elephant shows off her hose-showering skills. Credit: Urban et al./Current Biology Mary the elephant shows off her hose-showering skills. Credit: Urban et al./Current Biology An Asian elephant named Mary living at the...

Ars Technica

Barely nine months after the last cut, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will again reduce its workforce. On Wednesday, the lab will lay 325 employees off, representing about 5 percent of the workforce at the California-based laboratory...

Ars Technica

The astronauts who came home from the International Space Station last month experienced some drama on the high frontier, and some of it accompanied them back to Earth. In orbit, the astronauts aborted two spacewalks, both under unusual...

Ars Technica

Raquel Garcia has been fighting for years to clean up the air in her neighborhood southwest of downtown Detroit. Living a little over a mile from the Ambassador Bridge, which thousands of freight trucks cross every day en route to the Port...

Ars Technica

Like a lot of competitors in the global launch industry, Russia for a long time dismissed the prospects of a reusable first stage for a rocket. As late as 2016, an official with the Russian agency that develops strategy for the country's...