Pure Science

Ars Technica

Ancient rituals and customs often leave behind obvious archaeological evidence. From the impeccably preserved mummies of Egypt to psychoactive substance residue that remained at the bottom of a clay vessel for thousands of years, it seems...

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It's pretty obvious at this point that the Trump administration is waging a full-scale assault on US science. It has proposed budgets that would be catastrophic, stopped the flow of research funds to a number of universities, and sought to...

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Serious badminton players are constantly exploring different techniques to give them an edge over opponents. One of the latest innovations is the spin serve, a devastatingly effective method in which a player adds a pre-spin just before...

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In southwest Arkansas, the state government runs what might be the world's most unusual diamond mine. For the price of a movie ticket, anyone can dig for diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park—and keep whatever they find. The 37-acre...

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Every dog owner knows that canines are natural scavengers and that vigilance is required to ensure they don't eat toxic substances. But accidental ingestions still happen—like the chihuahua who vets discovered had somehow managed to ingest...

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After several days of working its way across the open and at times hostile Atlantic Ocean this week, Hurricane Erin found more favorable conditions and exploded in intensity on Friday night. Shortly before noon on Saturday, the National...

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Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart,...

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SpaceX is continuing with final preparations for the 10th full-scale test flight of the company's enormous Starship rocket after receiving launch approval Friday from the Federal Aviation Administration. Engineers completed a final test of...

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Welcome to Edition 8.06 of the Rocket Report! Two of the world's most storied rocket builders not named SpaceX achieved major successes this week. Arianespace's Ariane 6 rocket launched from French Guiana on its third flight Tuesday night...

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Scientists have figured out how to make frozen discs of ice self-propel across a patterned metal surface, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. It's the latest breakthrough to come out of...

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Inca bureaucrats recorded all the goings-on in their bustling empire using knotted cords called khipu, where the position and order of the knots represented numbers. They relied on the khipu system to track people, taxes, produce,...

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Most people would recognize the device in the image above, although they probably wouldn't know it by its formal name: the Crookes radiometer. As its name implies, placing the radiometer in light produces a measurable change: the blades...

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing government agencies to "eliminate or expedite" environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the...

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United Launch Alliance delivered multiple US military satellites into a high-altitude orbit after a prime-time launch Tuesday night, marking an important transition from development to operations for the company's new Vulcan rocket. This...

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It's no secret that much of social media has become profoundly dysfunctional. Rather than bringing us together into one utopian public square and fostering a healthy exchange of ideas, these platforms too often create filter bubbles or...

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OpenAI and its cofounder Sam Altman are preparing to back a company that will compete with Elon Musk’s Neuralink by connecting human brains with computers, heightening the rivalry between the two billionaire entrepreneurs. The new venture,...

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After more than a decade of development and testing, US military officials are finally ready to entrust United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket to haul a batch of national security satellites into space. An experimental military navigation...

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Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta are reeling from a deadly shooting that unfolded Friday evening. The shooting left one local police officer dead, at least four agency buildings riddled with...

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It's easier than ever to manipulate video footage to deceive the viewer and increasingly difficult for fact checkers to detect such manipulations. Cornell University scientists developed a new weapon in this ongoing arms race: software...

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Later this summer, a fluorescent reddish-pink spiral will bloom across the Wilkinson Basin in the Gulf of Maine, about 40 miles northeast of Cape Cod. Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will release the nontoxic water...

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The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture. “It's one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish Museum of Natural History. So when some...

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Most adhesives can’t stick to wet surfaces because water and other fluids disrupt the adhesive’s bonding mechanisms. This problem, though, has been beautifully solved by evolution in remora suckerfish, which use an adhesive disk on top of...

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When a Spinosaurus attacked a T. rex in Jurassic Park III, both giant carnivores tried to finish the fight with one powerful bite of their bone-crushing jaws. The Spinosaurus won, because when the movie was being made back in the early...

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Texas is gearing up for war as a savage, flesh-eating fly appears poised for a US invasion and is expanding its range of victims. On Friday, the Texas Department of Agriculture announced the debut of TDA Swormlure, a synthetic bait...

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The nation’s premier group of scientific advisers announced Thursday that it will conduct an independent, fast-track review of the latest climate science. It will do so with an eye to weighing in on the Trump administration’s planned...

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On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. The order requires that any announcement of funding opportunities be reviewed by...

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Some stone tools found near a river on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi suggest that the first hominins had reached the islands by at least 1.04 million years ago. That's around the same time that the ancestors of the infamously...

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Credit: IPHES-CERCA/Luis Quevedo/Madrid Scientific Films Human remains from 11 individuals recovered from El Mirador Cave in Spain showed evidence of cannibalism, archaeologists have concluded. According to a new paper published in the...

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Snowball the dancing cockatoo gets down with his bad self to the Backstreet Boys. In 2008, a YouTube video featuring an Eleanora cockatoo named Snowball dancing to the beat of the Backstreet Boys went viral. His killer moves stunned...

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Biology is one of the areas in which AI and machine learning approaches have seen some spectacular successes, such as designing enzymes to digest plastics and proteins to block snake venom. But in an era of seemingly endless AI hype, it...

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In a 300-plus page final report released today, the US Coast Guard has analyzed the 2023 Titan sub implosion from every conceivable angle and came to a clear conclusion: OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was a dangerous and deeply unpleasant...

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Last week, the EPA made lots of headlines by rejecting the document that establishes its ability to regulate the greenhouse gases that are warming our climate. While the legal assault on regulations grabbed most of the attention, it was...

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Wasps living around a Cold War-era nuclear facility in South Carolina have built at least four radioactive nests, raising questions about their source of hazardous material and the extent of environmental contamination, according to a...

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The next four-person team to live and work aboard the International Space Station departed from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, taking aim at the massive orbiting research complex for a planned stay of six to eight...

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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 each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year,...

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This is Part 2 of our interview with Col. Raj Agrawal, the former commander of the Space Force's Space Mission Delta 2. If it seems like there's a satellite launch almost every day, the numbers will back you up. The US Space Force's...

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The United States added 22,332 megawatts of power plant capacity in the first half of this year, and the vast majority of it was utility-scale solar, batteries and onshore wind. Natural gas was next, and there was zero new coal or nuclear,...

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Amid the Trump administration's ongoing efforts to wrest the power of the purse from Congress, an estimated $15 billion allotted by lawmakers to fund life-saving biomedical research via the National Institutes of Health was temporarily...

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Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Per the authors, it's the...

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Builders in ancient Rome used a special kind of ancient concrete to construct their aqueducts, bridges, and buildings. But is Roman concrete more sustainable than the Portland cement used in today's concrete? The answer is more nuanced...

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Back-to-back engine failures doomed a privately developed Australian rocket moments after liftoff Tuesday, cutting short a long-shot attempt to reach orbit with the country's first homegrown launch vehicle. The 82-foot-tall (25-meter) Eris...

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The Trump administration has proposed curbing the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases by unwinding rules that control emissions from fossil fuel drilling, power plants, and cars. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator...

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It's undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the emergence of viral memes...

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“We will drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump declared at his inauguration on Jan. 20. Echoing the slogan that exemplified his energy policies during the campaign, he made his message clear: more oil and gas, lower prices, greater...

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Firefly Aerospace seeks to raise more than $600 million through a public stock offering, an arrangement that would boost the company's market valuation to near $5.5 billion, according to a document filed with the SEC on Monday. The launch...

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The flagship health journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has grown quiet this year, and a report from MedPage Today indicates that a variety of actions by the Trump administration may be to blame for...

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Scientists long thought that Neanderthals were avid meat eaters. Based on chemical analysis of Neanderthal remains, it seemed like they’d been feasting on as much meat as apex predators such as lions and hyenas. But as a group,...

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For two years, Col. Raj Agrawal commanded the US military unit responsible for tracking nearly 50,000 human-made objects whipping through space. In this role, he was keeper of the orbital catalog and led teams tasked with discerning...

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Next month marks the 20th anniversary of one of the most devastating natural disasters in US history: Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm that made landfall on August 29, 2005. The storm itself was bad enough, but the resulting surge of...

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For decades we’ve been trying to make the robots smarter and more physically capable by mimicking biological intelligence and movement. “But in doing so, we’ve been just replicating the results of biological evolution—I say we need to...