Pure Science

Ars Technica

A recent study showed that Mars was warm and wet billions of years ago. The finding contrasts with another theory that this era was mainly cold and icy. The result has implications for the idea that life could have developed on the planet...

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It was the image that launched a cultural icon. In 1967, in the Northern California woods, a 7-foot-tall, ape-like creature covered in black fur and walking upright was captured on camera, at one point turning around to look straight down...

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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Saturday the agency is looking at ways to prevent the fueling problems plaguing the Space Launch System rocket before the Artemis III mission. Artemis III is slated to be the first crew mission to...

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Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two. The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than the Earth is—and...

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There are plenty of unanswered questions about the origin of life on Earth. But the research community has largely reached consensus that one of the key steps was the emergence of an RNA molecule that could replicate itself. RNA, like its...

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The heavy version of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket launched for the first time Thursday, hauling 32 spacecraft to low-Earth orbit for Amazon's satellite broadband constellation. The Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Center on the...

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An elephant's trunk is a marvelous thing, flexible enough to bend and stretch as it forages for food, but also stiff enough to grasp and maneuver even delicate objects like peanuts or a tortilla chip. That's because the trunk is highly...

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Very few people alive today have seen the Appalachian forests as they existed a century ago. Even as state and national parks preserved ever more of the ecosystem, fungal pathogens from Asia nearly wiped out one of the dominant species of...

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Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is accustomed to getting makeovers. It got another one Wednesday with the removal of the Crew Access Arm used by astronauts to board their rides to space. Construction workers...

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On Wednesday, a fossil-fuel lobbying group called the Washington Coal Club awarded President Trump a trophy that named him the "Undisputed Champion of Clean, Beautiful Coal." Trump took advantage of the opportunity to take his latest shot...

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The pre-Inca Chincha Kingdom (circa 1000-1400 CE), along Peru's southern coast, was one of the most wealthy and influential of its time before falling to the Inca and Spanish empires. Scientists have long puzzled over the foundation for...

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Following three of the warmest years on record, as scientists reckon with climate tipping points and states and cities grapple with the escalating cost of extreme weather and more intense wildfires, the Trump administration this week is...

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The upgraded Super Heavy booster slated to launch SpaceX's next Starship flight has completed cryogenic proof testing, clearing a hurdle that resulted in the destruction of the company's previous booster. SpaceX announced the milestone in...

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On Friday, a body that advises US judges revised the document it created to help judges grapple with scientific issues. The move came after a group of Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to complain about the document's...

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At the end of January, Washington, DC, saw an extremely unusual event. The MAHA Institute, which was set up to advocate for some of the most profoundly unscientific ideas of our time, hosted leaders of the best-funded scientific...

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Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group. By...

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In the spring of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic brought global industry and travel nearly to a halt, satellite sensors recorded a dramatic plunge in nitrogen dioxide, a byproduct of internal combustion engines and heavy industry. For a...

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Last year, a team of scientists presented evidence that spruce trees in Italy's Dolomite mountains synchronized their bioelectrical activity in anticipation of a partial solar eclipse—a potentially exciting new insight into the...

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Members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee voted to approve a NASA authorization bill this week, advancing legislation chock full of policy guidelines meant to give lawmakers a voice in the space agency's strategic...

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Welcome to Edition 8.28 of the Rocket Report! The big news in rocketry this week was that NASA still hasn't solved the problem with hydrogen leaks on the Space Launch System. The problem caused months of delays before the first SLS launch...

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Little kids hosting make-believe tea parties is a fixture of childhood play time and long presumed to be exclusively a human ability. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University presented evidence in a new paper published in the journal...

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Back in 2022, astronomers were puzzled by a so-called “tidal disruption event” (TDE), dubbed AT2018hyz, that had faded when it was first noticed three years earlier, only to unexpectedly reanimate and burp out extremely bright radio waves....

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In 2023, scientists identified the compounds in the balms used to mummify the organs of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman, suggesting that the recipes were unusually complex and used ingredients not native to the region. The authors also...

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The launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, the first flight of astronauts to the Moon in more than 53 years, will have to wait another month after a fueling test Monday uncovered hydrogen leaks in the connection between the rocket and its...

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cracked down on lead-based products—including lead paint and leaded gasoline—in the 1970s because of its toxic effects on human health. Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed human hair...

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The Trump administration is no fan of renewable energy, but it reserves special ire for wind power. Trump himself has repeatedly made false statements about the cost of wind power, its use around the world, and its environmental impacts....

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On Friday, a judge ruled that the Trump administration violated the law in forming its Climate Working Group, which released a report that was intended to undercut the rationale behind greenhouse gas regulations. The judge overseeing the...

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For most of their evolutionary history, narwhals have relied more on sound than sight to survive in the Arctic’s dark icy waters. The speckled toothed whales—sometimes referred to as “unicorns of the sea” for the long, spiral tusks that...

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If all goes according to plan Monday, NASA's launch team at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will load 755,000 gallons of super-cold propellants into the rocket built to send the Artemis II mission toward the Moon. The fuel loading is part...

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When a new presidential administration comes in, it is responsible for filling around 4,000 jobs sprinkled across the federal government’s vast bureaucracy. These political appointees help carry out the president’s agenda, and, at least in...

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Exterminators keep getting calls for a reason. Wood-devouring insects, such as beetles, termites, and carpenter ants, are constantly chewing through walls or infecting trees and breaking them down. The fight against these insects usually...

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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. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks....

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Ice fishing is a longstanding tradition in Nordic countries, with competitions proving especially popular. Those competitions can also tell scientists something about how social cues influence how we make foraging decisions, according to a...

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On Tuesday, OpenAI released a free AI-powered workspace for scientists. It's called Prism, and it has drawn immediate skepticism from researchers who fear the tool will accelerate the already overwhelming flood of low-quality papers into...

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Illinois lawmakers plan to introduce a climate change superfund bill in the state legislature this session, the latest in a growing number of states seeking to make fossil fuel companies pay up for the fast-growing financial fallout of...

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When the James Webb Space Telescope sent its first high-definition infrared images back to Earth, astronomers noticed several tiny, glowing, crimson stains. These objects, quickly named “Little Red Dots,” were too bright to be normal...

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When King Charles VIII of France occupied Naples in 1495, his army of nearly 20,000 mercenaries became the ground zero of the “Great Pox,” the first massive venereal syphilis pandemic in Europe, which went on to cause up to 5 million...

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If you're in the space business long enough, you learn there are numerous ways a rocket can fail. I've written my share of stories about misbehaving rockets and the extensive investigations that usually—but not always—reveal what went...

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Gen. Michael Guetlein, the senior officer in charge of the US military's planned Golden Dome missile defense shield, has laid out an audacious schedule for deploying a network of space-based sensors and interceptors by the end of President...

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For close to a century, geoscientists have pondered a mystery: Where did Earth’s lighter elements go? Compared to amounts in the Sun and in some meteorites, Earth has less hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, as well as noble gases like...

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The chair of a federal vaccine advisory panel under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made his stance clear on vaccines in a podcast last week—and that stance was so alarming that the American Medical Association was...

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Crew members traveling to the lunar surface on NASA's Artemis missions should be gearing up for a grind. They will wear heavier spacesuits than those worn by the Apollo astronauts, and NASA will ask them to do more than the first...

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Graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super...

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Welcome to Edition 8.26 of the Rocket Report! The past week has been one of advancements and setbacks in the rocket business. NASA rolled the massive rocket for the Artemis II mission to its launch pad in Florida, while Chinese launchers...

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Every spring, raptors return to nesting sites across northern Michigan. The smallest of these birds of prey, a falcon called the American kestrel (Falco sparverius), flies through the region’s many cherry orchards and spends its days...

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The world’s oldest surviving rock art is a faded outline of a hand on an Indonesian cave wall, left 67,800 years ago. On a tiny island just off the coast of Sulawesi (a much larger island in Indonesia), a cave wall bears the stenciled...

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Researchers at Princeton University have built a swarm of interconnected mini-robots that "bloom" like flowers in response to changing light levels in an office. According to their new paper published in the journal Science Robotics, such...

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Even as exposure to floods, fire and extreme heat increase in the face of climate change, a popular tool for evaluating risk has disappeared from the nation’s leading real estate website. Zillow removed the feature displaying climate risk...

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Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces have made it possible to more accurately extract speech from neural signals in humans, but language is just one of the tools we use to communicate. “When my young nephew asks for ice cream...

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad. The rocket reached a top speed...