Pure Science

Ars Technica

The details of how animal life began are a bit murky. Most of the groups familiar today are present in the Cambrian, a period when they rapidly diversified, with familiar features evolving alongside bizarre creatures with no obvious modern...

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On Wednesday, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) released its numbers on what was built in 2025. And much as we saw in the US, solar power is the primary driver of change. The numbers show that the world installed an average...

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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. March's list...

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Many of the early exoplanet discoveries were exciting on their own, confirming that there really were strange new worlds out in the Universe. But over time, our focus has shifted more toward numbers, as we began using the frequency of...

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In 2023, the Swedish government announced that the country’s schools would be going back to basics, emphasizing skills such as reading and writing, particularly in early grades. After mostly being sidelined, physical books are now being...

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Launching to the Moon is an all-day undertaking, something the four astronauts waiting to climb aboard NASA's Artemis II rocket know well. "It is actually a very long day," said Victor Glover, the pilot on...

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The US military has always been part of NASA's human spaceflight program. The first astronauts were nearly all military pilots, and two of the four crew members set to fly around the Moon on NASA's Artemis II...

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires that, in the event of an emergency, all airplane passengers must be able to evacuate any aircraft within a 90-second window. But is that a realistic requirement, particularly given the...

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The two-day countdown for the launch of NASA's Artemis II mission began Monday evening, with clocks timed for the first of six opportunities in early April to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side...

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Last year, just before the Fourth of July holiday, the US Space Force officially took ownership of a new operating system for the GPS navigation network, raising hopes that one of the military's most troubled space programs might finally...

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Famed aviator Amelia Earhart mysteriously disappeared in 1937 during an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Speculative theories abound about what really happened to Earhart, but while tantalizing hints of...

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When George W. Maschke applied to work for the FBI in 1994, he had already held a security clearance for over 11 years. The government had deemed him trustworthy through his career in the Army. But soon, a machine and a man would not come...

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Three-hundred million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic era were buzzing with giant insects. Meganeuropsis permiana, a predatory insect resembling a modern-day dragonfly, had a wingspan of over 70 centimeters and weighed 100...

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Over a decade ago, when I was first starting to pretend I could write about quantum mechanics, I covered a truly bizarre experiment. One half of a pair of entangled photons was sent through a device it could navigate as either a particle...

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Our oceans are full of sophisticated, perfect traps: Nets, hooks, fishing lines. Designed to capture animals destined for our dinner tables, they often catch other wildlife too. This accidental harvest is known as bycatch, and every year...

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Welcome to Edition 8.35 of the Rocket Report! The headlines this week are again dominated by the big changes afoot in NASA's exploration program, with the announcement of a Moon base and a nuclear-powered rocket to Mars. The shakeups come...

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We all need a little validation now and then from friends or family, but sometimes too much validation can backfire—and the same is true of AI chatbots. There have been several recent cases of overly sycophantic AI tools leading to...

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Recent repairs to a centuries-old tile floor at a church in the Netherlands may have revealed the skeleton of the French Musketeer d’Artagnan. Today, Charles de Batz de Castlemore, Count d'Artagnan, is best known as a character in The...

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Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer....

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NASA's announcement Tuesday that it will "pause" work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration's space policy. But what should NASA...

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For as long as we've known that soil bacteria manufacture molecular weapons to fight each other, we've been swiping their battle plans. In clinics and hospitals, those turf-war weapons have become miraculous drugs of modern...

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PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is generally not a high-profile group. It tends to be noticed when things go wrong, such as when the PCAST head named by Biden had to resign due to abusive behavior....

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Bourbon is a multi-billion-dollar market, but the American barrel-aged whiskey also produces a lot of wasted grain at distilleries. Chemists at the University of Kentucky developed a method to transform that stillage into electrodes and...

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Roughly a year ago, Spain and Portugal went dark when the electrical grid of the entire Iberian Peninsula failed. While the grid operators did a heroic job of restarting the grid quickly, there were obvious questions about what had led to...

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When the Trump administration announced plans last year to rescind a rule limiting roadbuilding and timber harvests on millions of acres of national forests and grasslands, officials called the repeal necessary to prevent and manage...

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Jupiter's colossal storms generate lightning flashes at least 100 times more powerful than those on Earth, according to scientists analyzing data from NASA's Juno spacecraft. The findings were published March 20 in the journal AGU...

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On Monday, the Trump administration announced its newest approach to its goal of blocking the development of offshore wind: pay companies to walk away from lease sites they had paid for under the Biden administration. The Department of the...

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The rise of touchscreen technology has been a boon in many respects, but for people with long fingernails, there can be issues with the capacitive variety since fingernails are non-conductive and thus don't register on the screen as a...

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Generally, when you hear “water use” and “sustainability,” you expect those words to be followed by some bad news. Humanity’s enduring ability to ignore the math of declining water supplies is almost impressive. But there are cases where...

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BROOMFIELD, Colorado—One of NASA's oldest astronomy missions, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, has been out of action for more than a month as scientists await the arrival of a pioneering robotic rescue mission. The 21-year-old...

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More than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a more-than-70-ton machine trundled like a tank on its caterpillar tracks for a tenth of a mile—sucking up potato-sized nodules of rock packed with copper, manganese, cobalt,...

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On Monday, a paper announcing that all four DNA bases had been found on an asteroid sparked a lot of headlines. But many of the headlines omitted a key word needed to put the discovery in context: "again." The paper itself cited similar...

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Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the US government built its first rudimentary nuclear power...

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For the fourth time in a little more than a year, the US Space Force needs to send up a new satellite to replenish the military's GPS navigation network. And once again, the company the Pentagon is paying to launch it can't answer the...

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For more than 60 years, nearly every large rocket used some combination of the same liquid and solid propellants. Refined kerosene was favored for its easy handling and non-toxicity, hydrazine for its storability and simplicity, hydrogen...

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When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater in 2021, its primary mission was to scour the remnants of a dried-up Martian lakebed for signs of ancient life. Scientists have been focused on the crater's spectacular Western Delta,...

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A landmark site in the peopling of the Americas is several thousand years younger than we thought. While that means very different things about the site itself, it doesn’t change the big picture as much as the researchers who generated the...

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Despite being declared the third-hottest year on record, 2025 was a relatively quiet year for climate disasters in the US. No major hurricanes made landfall, while the total number of acres burned in wildfires last...

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If a battle is fought in space, it will look nothing like those depicted in the Star Wars franchise, with sleek TIE fighters blasting enemy ships with laser cannons and mag-pulses. Instead, these battles will be cerebral and...

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People in North America adopted the bow and arrow as replacement weapons for the dart and atlatl about 1,400 years ago, according to a new paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus. But the adoption was almost immediate in southern...

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In the US, the economics of coal power generation are marginal at best, and a large number of coal plants have shut down as cheaper renewables and natural gas have surged. The Trump administration has used a number of methods to swim...

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Neanderthals may have used birch tar as more than just glue; it could have helped them ward off infection and even insect bites. People from several modern Indigenous cultures, including the Mi'kmaq of eastern Canada, use tar from birch...

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On Monday, a consortium that oversees the US's premier atmospheric research center announced it was suing the Trump administration over plans to shut it down. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, provides a home for...

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A large meteor crashed through the sound barrier above northern Ohio on Tuesday morning, producing a large fireball and what local residents described as an extremely loud "boom." According to various eyewitness reports, the meteor's...

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Judges are frequently confronted with cases that hinge upon scientific information that their educational backgrounds may leave them ill-equipped to manage. Because of this challenge, the Federal Judicial Center, a group within the...

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Scientists have discovered that male fireflies in a South Carolina swamp follow local interaction rules to synchronize their flashing mating displays. The research is being presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver....

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With its Alpha series of game-playing AIs, Google's DeepMind group seemed to have found a way for its AIs to tackle any game, mastering games like chess and Go by repeatedly playing itself during training. But then some odd things happened...

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One of the most extreme explosions in the universe are Type I superluminous supernovae. “They are one of the brightest explosions in the Universe,” says Joseph Farah, an astrophysicist at the University of California Santa Barbara. For...

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Welcome to Edition 8.33 of the Rocket Report! NASA officials seem optimistic about launching the Artemis II mission next month, so confident that they will forgo another fueling test on the Space Launch System rocket to check the integrity...

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Centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire, a much smaller kingdom on the central coast of Peru already had a sophisticated trade network—one it used to import live parrots across the Andes from the Amazon rainforest. Australian National...