Pure Science

Ars Technica

Type Ia supernovae are critical tools in astronomy, since they all appear to explode with the same intensity, allowing us to use their brightness as a measure of distance. The distance measures they've given us have been critical to...

Ars Technica

There is increasing consumer demand for low- or non-alcoholic beers, and science is helping improve both the brewing process and the flavor profiles of the final product. One promising approach to better non-alcoholic beer involves...

Ars Technica

The Trump administration plans to cancel a fleet of orbiting data relay satellites managed by the Space Development Agency and replace it with a secretive network that, so far, relies primarily on SpaceX's Starlink Internet constellation,...

Ars Technica

Far from the front lines of the climate crisis, 100 men and women in air-conditioned offices, 61 of them millionaires, are making decisions that could increase United States carbon dioxide emissions, and the warming of the climate they are...

Ars Technica

A boomerang carved from a mammoth tusk is one of the oldest in the world, and it may be even older than archaeologists originally thought, according to a recent round of radiocarbon dating. Archaeologists unearthed the mammoth-tusk...

Ars Technica

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,...

Ars Technica

Rory de Vries, an associate professor of virology in the Netherlands, was lifting weights at the gym when he noticed a WhatsApp message from his research partners at Columbia University, telling him his research funding had been cancelled....

Ars Technica

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, director Ron Howard's masterful love letter to NASA's Apollo program in general and the eponymous space mission in particular. So we're taking the opportunity...

Ars Technica

Stephen Hawking, a British physicist and arguably the most famous man suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), communicated with the world using a sensor installed in his glasses. That sensor used tiny movements of a single...

Ars Technica

Some of the most ingenious tech has been inspired by nature. From color-changing materials that function like cephalopod skin to a tiny biomimetic robot that looks and moves like an actual cockroach, the extraordinary adaptations of some...

Ars Technica

Welcome to Edition 7.50 of the Rocket Report! We're nearly halfway through the year, and it seems like a good time to look back on the past six months. What has been most surprising to me in the world of rockets? First, I didn't expect...

Ars Technica

NASA's Space Launch System appears to have a finite shelf life. The Trump administration wants to cancel it after just three launches, while the preliminary text of a bill making its way through Congress would extend it to five flights....

Ars Technica

Regeneration is a trick many animals, including lizards, starfish, and octopuses, have mastered. Axolotls, a salamander species originating in Mexico, can regrow pretty much everything from severed limbs, through eyes and parts of brain,...

Ars Technica

Earlier this week, we reported on a Swedish archaeologist who spent the last three years sailing the fjords in a replica boat similar to those the Vikings may have used. Not to be outdone, Japanese researchers have followed suit, building...

Ars Technica

Battery electrode materials need to do a lot of things well. They need to be conductors to get charges to and from the ions that shuttle between the electrodes. They also need to have an open structure that allows the ions to move around...

Ars Technica

The four people at the helm of America's space agency held a town hall meeting with employees Wednesday, fielding questions about downsizing, layoffs, and proposed budget cuts that threaten to undermine NASA's mission and prestige. Janet...

Ars Technica

On Thursday, we encourage you to join us for a live chat with Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and researcher at Berkeley Earth. We'll talk a bit about how he got into climate science and ended up at Berkeley Earth and the role that...

Ars Technica

In recent years, a curious hypothetical particle called the axion, invented to address challenging problems with the strong nuclear force, has emerged as a leading candidate to explain dark matter. Although the potential for axions to...

Ars Technica

Back in 2022, we reported on the Australian National Maritime Museum's (ANMM) announcement that its researchers had confirmed that a shipwreck proposed as a likely candidate in 2018 is indeed the remains of the HMS Endeavour. However, the...

Ars Technica

For many species, producing an embryo is a bit of a contest between males and females. Males want as many offspring as possible, and want the females to devote as many resources as possible to each of them. Females are better at...

Ars Technica

For the second time in two months, United Launch Alliance sent a batch of 27 broadband Internet satellites into orbit for Amazon on Monday morning. Just like the last flight on April 28, an Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral,...

Ars Technica

Experimental archaeologist Greer Jarrett of Lund University in Sweden has been sailing in the footsteps of Vikings for the last three years. If you want to learn more about how and where the Vikings sailed, making the journey through...

Ars Technica

Measurements at the Large Hadron Collider have been stymied by one of the most central phenomena of the quantum world. But now, a young researcher has championed a new method to solve the problem using deep neural networks. The Large...

Ars Technica

A NASA spacecraft bound for an unexplored metal-rich asteroid has reignited its plasma thrusters, continuing its cruise deeper into the Solar System after switching to a backup fuel line. The $1.4 billion Psyche mission, built to explore...

Ars Technica

Legend has it that physicist Ernest Rutherford once dismissed all sciences other than physics as mere "stamp collecting." (Whether he actually said it is a matter of some debate.) But we now live in the information age, and scientists have...

Ars Technica

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. John Belizaire says he has a secret hiding in plain...

Ars Technica

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster horror movie based on the bestselling novel by Peter Benchley. We're marking the occasion with a tribute to this classic film and its enduring impact on the popular...

Ars Technica

On Thursday, Microsoft's Azure Quantum group announced that it has settled on a plan for getting error correction on quantum computers. While the company pursues its own hardware efforts, the Azure team is a platform provider that...

Ars Technica

MIT graduate student Alex Kachkine once spent nine months meticulously restoring a damaged baroque Italian painting, which left him plenty of time to wonder if technology could speed things up. Last week, MIT News announced his solution: a...

Ars Technica

SpaceX's next Starship rocket exploded during a ground test in South Texas late Wednesday, dealing another blow to a program already struggling to overcome three consecutive failures in recent months. The late-night explosion at SpaceX's...

Ars Technica

The 2009 discovery of footprints (human and animal) left behind in layers of clay and silt at New Mexico’s White Sands National Park sparked a contentious debate about when, exactly, human cultures first developed in North America. Until...

Ars Technica

Earlier this year, a biomedical researcher at the University of Michigan received an update from the National Institutes of Health. The federal agency, which funds a large swath of the country’s medical science, had given the green light...

Ars Technica

The blackout that took down the Iberian grid serving Spain and Portugal in April was the result of a number of smaller interacting problems, according to an investigation by the Spanish government. The report concludes that several steps...

Ars Technica

A 146,000-year-old skull from Harbin, China, belongs to a Denisovan, according to a recent study of proteins preserved inside the ancient bone. The paleoanthropologists who studied the Harbin skull in 2021 declared it a new (to us)...

Ars Technica

An experimental reusable rocket developed by the research and development arm of Honda Motor Company flew to an altitude of nearly 900 feet Tuesday, then landed with pinpoint precision at the carmaker's test facility in northern Japan. The...

Ars Technica

"Sally Ride became the first American woman to blast off into space, but beneath her unflappable composure, she carried a secret." On June 18, 1983, NASA astronaut Sally Ride made history as the first American woman in space aboard the...

Ars Technica

Anne Wojcicki has been declared the winner of a bankruptcy auction for 23andMe, the genetics testing start-up she founded, prevailing over a rival bid from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. TTAM Research Institute, a non-profit public benefit...

Ars Technica

Narrator Ryan Reynolds celebrates nature's outcasts in the new NatGeo docuseries Underdogs. Most of us have seen a nature documentary or two (or three) at some point in our lives, so it's a familiar format: sweeping majestic footage of...

Ars Technica

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. The American Midwest is home to some of the richest,...

Ars Technica

A fog harp prototype collects water vapor. Credit: Virginia Tech A fog harp prototype collects water vapor. Credit: Virginia Tech Arid coastal regions that are also prone to fog are prime locations for fog-harvesting devices as...

Ars Technica

Welcome to Edition 7.48 of the Rocket Report! The shock of last week's public spat between President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has worn off, and Musk expressed regret for some of his comments going after Trump on social...

Ars Technica

Human vision relies on photoreceptor cells in the retina that react to visible light and trigger neurons in the optic nerve to send signals to the brain. Degradation of these photoreceptors is the leading cause of vision impairments,...

Ars Technica

Robots like Atlas, Spot, and Stretch have amazed people with natural, life-like agility and body balance. What they were lacking, though, was a way to quickly connect this natural movement to perception—the robotic equivalent of the...

Ars Technica

If signed into law as written, the White House's proposal to slash nearly 25 percent from NASA's budget would have some dire consequences. It would cut the agency's budget from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. Adjusted for...

Ars Technica

A critical measure of the ocean’s health suggests that the world’s marine systems are in greater peril than scientists had previously realized and that parts of the ocean have already reached dangerous tipping points. A study, published...

Ars Technica

On Tuesday, IBM released its plans for building a system that should push quantum computing into entirely new territory: a system that can both perform useful calculations while catching and fixing errors and be utterly impossible to model...

Ars Technica

The US Air Force is moving closer to authorizing SpaceX to move into one of the largest launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, with plans to use the facility for up to 76 launches of the company's Starship rocket...

Ars Technica

With their quick-change camouflage and high level of intelligence, it’s not surprising that the public and scientific experts alike are fascinated by octopuses. Their abilities to recognize faces, solve puzzles, and learn behaviors from...

Ars Technica

A robotic lander developed by a Japanese company named ispace plummeted to the Moon's surface Thursday, destroying a small rover and several experiments intended to demonstrate how future missions could mine and harvest lunar resources....

Ars Technica

Galaxies are far more than the sum of their stars. Long before stars even formed, dark matter clumped up and drew regular matter together with its gravity, providing the invisible scaffolding upon which stars and galaxies eventually grew....