Pure Science

Ars Technica

At age 49, Jan Janisch-Hanzlik’s multiple sclerosis was destroying her freedom to live the life she wanted. She gave up her active nursing job for a desk role. Frequent falls made her afraid to carry her grandchildren. She had to move to a...

Ars Technica

Coal is by far the most polluting fuel that we use. It produces the most carbon emissions per unit of energy, and impurities in the coal produce a lot of sulfur dioxide aerosols, as well as nitrous and nitrogen oxides. Then there’s the...

Ars Technica

The world's leading space powers desperately want to know what the others are up to high above the equator. For more than a decade, the US military has operated a fleet of "inspector" satellites designed to sidle up to other spacecraft in...

Ars Technica

AI-generated slop has shown up everywhere, including in the peer-reviewed literature. Fake citations, unedited prompt responses, and nonsensical diagrams have all slipped past editors and peer reviewers, and it's not always clear if there...

Ars Technica

Cement production alone currently accounts for about 8 percent of global CO2 emissions, so considerable effort is going into lowering that number. Efficiency can be increased, and energy sources can be swapped for cleaner ones, but a...

Ars Technica

This week, a company called Casimir Inc. emerged from “stealth mode” to announce that it had raised significant funding from venture capitalists willing to roll the dice on free energy. That’s right: a startup has gotten serious backing to...

Ars Technica

Welcome to Edition 8.41 of the Rocket Report! The stories of the world's two most powerful rockets are now intertwined. Hardware for NASA's third Space Launch System rocket is coming together at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, while...

Ars Technica

Vocal fry, aka "creaky voice," is a distinctive drop in pitch, usually at the end of sentences, associated with the speech patterns of young women in particular. Britney Spears is the go-to example of the trend, having famously used it in...

Ars Technica

Scientists said this week that a developing El Niño is likely to amplify heatwaves, droughts and floods this year, but warned that the long-term warming caused by burning fossil fuels remains the main driver of climate extremes. El Niño is...

Ars Technica

Humanity's ancestry has grown far clearer thanks to our ability to obtain ancient DNA. We now know that, as humans left Africa, they interbred with the groups they met there, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Evidence from the Denisovan genome...

Ars Technica

Olympic weightlifting consists of three basic movements performed on a barbell: the snatch, the clean, and the jerk (with the latter two executed in combination). At such an elite level, athletes seek to exploit every possible advantage,...

Ars Technica

The world’s first dentist was a Neanderthal, according to a recent study. 59,000 years ago in what’s now southwestern Siberia, a Neanderthal had a toothache. It must have been a doozy because they were desperate enough to sit still while...

Ars Technica

US Space Command is inviting commercial companies to participate in a new series of classified wargames. The first exercise simulated a scenario involving a potential nuclear detonation in orbit. Gen. Stephen Whiting, the senior officer in...

Ars Technica

For decades, astronomers looking through telescopes like Hubble have been trying to catch a glimpse of the ancient epoch when the Universe's first generation of stars ignited. But the small galaxies that were the building blocks of the...

Ars Technica

For the third time in three years, SpaceX has stacked a new version of its enormous Starship rocket on a launch pad in South Texas, just a few miles north of the US-Mexico border. The newest-generation Starship, known as Starship Version...

Ars Technica

At 5:26 am local time on August 10, 2025, a massive wedge of rock with a volume of at least 63.5 million cubic meters detached from a mountain above Alaska’s Tracy Arm fjord. The falling rock plummeted into the deep waters at the terminus...

Ars Technica

On a bright afternoon in Jiangsu, China, Xin Yin is playing personal trainer to some mice. One by one, he sets the rodents on a miniature treadmill that starts slow and gradually speeds up. These littermates are born athletes, able to run...

Ars Technica

To get quantum computing to work, we will ultimately need lots of high-quality qubits, which we can tie together into groups of error-corrected logical qubits. Companies are taking distinct approaches to get there, but you can think of...

Ars Technica

A little more than three years since NASA's Ingenuity helicopter ended its pioneering mission at Mars, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are designing next-generation Martian rotorcraft to carry heavier payloads...

Ars Technica

Archaeologists continue to use DNA analysis to identify the recovered remains of the doomed crew members of Captain Sir John S. Franklin's 1846 Arctic expedition to cross the Northwest Passage. They can now add four more names to the list...

Ars Technica

It’s not in your head. Climate change is contributing to longer and more severe pollen seasons across the Northern Hemisphere. Dr. Neelima Tummala, an ear, nose, and throat doctor at NYU Langone Health, said her patients tell her every...

Ars Technica

Last fall, we featured an extensive interview with Petter Törnberg of the University of Amsterdam, who studies the underlying mechanisms of social media that give rise to its worst aspects: the partisan echo chambers, the concentration of...

Ars Technica

It is far too soon to mention retirement, but astute observers of the space industry have noticed SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket is not launching as often as it used to. The decline is modest so far, and it does not signal any problem...

Ars Technica

NASA's goal of reaching the Moon's surface as many as 21 times over the next two and a half years will require an overhaul of the agency's approach to buying lunar landers and success in rectifying the myriad problems that have, so far,...

Ars Technica

The Trump administration has brought US onshore wind development to a halt citing national security concerns, representing a major escalation in the president’s crusade against renewable energy. Approvals for about 165 onshore wind...

Ars Technica

Violin makers, aka luthiers, traditionally learn from hands-on experience how to craft parts and select materials to shape an instrument's final sound. MIT engineers hope to streamline that painstaking process with their new virtual...

Ars Technica

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. April’s list...

Ars Technica

Scorpions are armed with dual front pincers (technically known as chelae or pedipalp appendages) and a venom-injecting telson, or stinger, on the posterior of their tail. These things look dangerous enough on their own, but a chemical...

Ars Technica

Welcome to Edition 8.39 of the Rocket Report! There's a lot of news to share in the universe of powerful rockets this week, and we're delighted to sum it up in this week's edition. The biggest rocket of them all, Starship, had a relatively...

Ars Technica

The genetic code is central to life. With minor variations, everything uses the same sets of three DNA bases to encode the same 20 amino acids. We have discovered no major exceptions to this, leading researchers to conclude that this code...

Ars Technica

Even before the Trump administration went to war against DEI and attempts to address historical discrimination, diversity efforts in the US were controversial. A pivotal moment came in 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled that race-based...

Ars Technica

University of Oregon chemist Christopher Hendon loves his coffee—so much so that studying all the factors that go into creating the perfect cuppa constitutes a significant area of research for him. His latest project: discovering a novel...

Ars Technica

If you look at a Neanderthal skull and a Homo sapiens skull, they're visibly different: Neanderthal skulls are lower and longer, whereas ours tend to be rounder. However, those differences probably don’t say much about the brains within...

Ars Technica

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told lawmakers on Monday that SpaceX and Blue Origin, the agency's two lunar lander contractors, say they could have their spacecraft ready for the next Artemis mission in Earth orbit in late 2027,...

Ars Technica

The next time you walk into a purportedly "haunted" house and sense a ghostly presence, consider that those feelings might be due to vibrating pipes, mechanical or climate control systems, rumbling from traffic, or wind turbines, rather...

Ars Technica

All 22 members of the National Science Board were terminated by the Trump administration via a terse email Friday. The administration has provided no explanation for purging the board, which helps steer the National Science Foundation and...

Ars Technica

The Pacific Ocean is a giant climate cauldron, with a powerful heat engine that affects storms, fisheries, and rainfall patterns half a world away, and scientists are watching closely to see if it’s about to boil over. Their projections...

Ars Technica

Switching from one smartphone to another is mostly a smooth procedure. You log into your accounts and your apps, preferences, and contacts should sync to the new hardware. But in the world of robotics, swapping an old robotic arm for a...

Ars Technica

With the circumlunar flight of Artemis II, and the prospect of landing astronauts on the lunar surface within a few years, humanity is preempting an era where the imprint of visiting the Moon would be erased from living memory. There are...

Ars Technica

The US Space Force released a list Friday of a dozen companies working on Space-Based Interceptors for the Pentagon's Golden Dome initiative, a multilayer defense system to shield US territory from drones and ballistic, hypersonic, and...

Ars Technica

Some 80 million years ago, the late Cretaceous oceans were patrolled by 17-meter mosasaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs, and massive, predatory sharks. For decades, the paleontological consensus was that this was the age of vertebrates;...

Ars Technica

Shortly after their discovery, carbon nanotubes seemed to be a material wonder. There were metallic and semiconducting forms; they were tiny and incredibly light; and they could only be broken by tearing apart chemical bonds. The ideas for...

Ars Technica

The gravitational constant, affectionally known as "Big G," is one of the most fundamental constants of our universe. Its value describes the strength of the gravitational force acting on two masses separated by a given distance—or if you...

Ars Technica

After several tests of unusual "nesting doll" satellites in low-Earth orbit, Russia is now fielding operational anti-satellite weapons with valuable US government satellites in their crosshairs, the four-star general leading US Space...

Ars Technica

GREENBELT, Md.—On Tuesday, NASA invited the press to look at the fully assembled Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is now ready to join the ranks of the great observatories in orbit, ahead of its September launch. The Roman Space...

Ars Technica

Physicists have spent the last 20 years pondering an apparent discrepancy between experimental results and theoretical predictions for the magnetic properties of the muon, the electron's heavier cousin—a mismatch that hinted at a possible...

Ars Technica

On Tuesday, the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction blocking the US government from applying a range of restrictions on renewable power development, at least for the parties in the suit....

Ars Technica

On Monday, the Energy Information Agency released its analysis of the energy trends of 2025, covering the entire globe. It confirms and extends the primary conclusion of a more limited analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency:...

Ars Technica

The Pentagon has canceled a ground control system for the US military's GPS satellite navigation network after the program's enduring problems "proved insurmountable," the US Space Force announced in a press release Monday. The Global...

Ars Technica

Bruce the kea—a species of alpine parrot native to New Zealand—lost his upper beak in an accident as a young bird. But that hasn't stopped him from becoming the dominant male in his kea community (known as a "circus") at the Willowbank...