Pure Science

Ars Technica

On May 16, 2024, a powerful derecho swept through Houston, killing seven people and causing significant damage to several of the city's towering skyscrapers. Those buildings were constructed to withstand much stronger hurricane-force winds...

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Welcome to Edition 7.32 of the Rocket Report! It's true that the US space program has always been political. Domestic and global politics have driven nearly all of the US government's decisions on major space issues, most notably President...

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Crafty cuttlefish employ several different camouflaging displays while hunting their prey, according to a new paper published in the journal Ecology, including mimicking benign ocean objects like a leaf or coral, or flashing dark stripes...

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Over the weekend, the Trump administration fired several frontline responders to the ongoing H5N1 bird flu outbreak—then quickly backpedaled, rescinding those terminations and attempting to reinstate the critical staff. The termination...

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Scientists can now explain the prevailing unpredictability of contact electrification, unveiling order from what has long been considered chaos. Static electricity—specifically the triboelectric effect, aka contact electrification—is...

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On Wednesday, Microsoft released an update on its efforts to build quantum computing hardware based on the physics of quasiparticles that have largely been the domain of theorists. The information coincides with the release of a paper in...

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Astronomers have detected over 5,800 confirmed exoplanets. One extreme class is ultra-hot Jupiters, of particular interest because they can provide a unique window into planetary atmospheric dynamics. According to a new paper published in...

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Public trust in science has been in the spotlight in recent years: After the US presidential election in November, one Wall Street Journal headline declared that "Science Lost America’s Trust.” Another publication called 2024 “the year of...

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If humanity is ever to spread out into the Solar System, we're going to need to find a way to put fuel into rockets somewhere other than the cozy confines of a launchpad on Earth. One option for that is in low-Earth orbit, which has the...

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President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal funding shows little sign of thawing for climate, energy and environmental justice programs. Despite two federal court orders directing the administration to resume distributing federal grants and...

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In the summer of 2024, a robotic mission landed for the first time on the far side of the Moon. The Chinese Chang’e-6 lander planted a flag, dug up more than four pounds of rock and soil, and brought it back home—an accomplishment widely...

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Enzymes are amazing catalysts. These proteins are made of nothing more than a handful of Earth-abundant elements, and they promote a vast array of reactions, convert chemical energy to physical motion, and act with remarkable specificity....

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Thanks to being an incompressible medium, water transmits vibrations both farther and faster than the air. (Here's a good video explainer on the subject.) This fact helps to explain how a US government-owned "moored passive acoustic...

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On Wednesday, a team of researchers announced that they got extremely lucky. The team is building a detector on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea that can identify those rare occasions when a neutrino happens to interact with the seawater...

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Biomedical research in the U.S. is world-class in part because of a long-standing partnership between universities and the federal government. On Feb. 7, 2025, the U.S. National Institutes of Health issued a policy that could weaken the...

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The search for extraterrestrial life has always been a key motivator of space exploration. But if we were to search Mars, Titan, or the subsurface oceans of Europa or Enceladus, it seems like all we can reasonably hope to find is...

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Last October, United Launch Alliance started stacking its third Vulcan rocket on a mobile launch platform in Florida in preparation for a mission for the US Space Force by the end of the year. That didn't happen, and ULA is still awaiting...

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On Friday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a sudden change to how it handles the indirect costs of research—the money that pays for things like support services and facilities maintenance. These costs help pay...

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The first-ever National Nature Assessment—which was based on significant public feedback and strove to reveal how nature loss influences climate change and impacts humanity—may still see the light of day after the Trump administration...

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Grants paid by the federal government have two components. One covers the direct costs of performing the research, paying for salaries, equipment, and consumables like chemicals or enzymes. But the government also pays what are called...

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The spring morning is cool and bright in the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park in Baja California, Mexico, as a bird takes to the skies. Its 9.8-foot wingspan casts a looming silhouette against the sunlight; the sound of its flight...

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Welcome to Edition 7.30 of the Rocket Report! The US government relies on SpaceX for a lot of missions. These include launching national security satellites, putting astronauts on the Moon, and global broadband communications. But there...

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Sometime during the next several weeks, the directors of federal agencies will receive a draft version of President Trump's budget request for the coming fiscal year, which begins on October 1. This "passback review" is a standard part of...

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With the closure of its last coal-fired power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, on September 30, 2024, the United Kingdom has taken a significant step toward its net-zero goals. It’s no small feat to end the 142-year era of coal-powered...

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There have been many studies on the capability of non-human animals to mimic transitive actions—actions that have a purpose. Hardly any studies have shown that animals are also capable of intransitive actions. Even though intransitive...

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Something in the sky captured the attention of astronomers in the final days of 2024. A telescope in Chile scanning the night sky detected a faint point of light, and it didn't correspond to any of the thousands of known stars, comets, and...

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Performing complex algorithms on quantum computers will eventually require access to tens of thousands of hardware qubits. For most of the technologies being developed, this creates a problem: It's difficult to create hardware that can...

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Do you long for that tart fruity flavor of a sour beer but wish the complicated brewing process were faster? Norwegian scientists might have the answer: field peas, as well as beans and lentils. According to a new paper published in the...

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Gecko feet have inspired many intriguing applications, including a sticky tape, adhesives, a "stickybot" climbing robot, and even a strapless bra design. Now. scientists have developed a new kind of anti-slip polymer that sticks to ice,...

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Boeing announced Monday it lost $523 million on the Starliner crew capsule program last year, putting the aerospace company $2 billion in the red on its NASA commercial crew contract since late 2019. The updated numbers are included in a...

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A lot of human society requires what's called a "theory of mind"—the ability to infer the mental state of another person and adjust our actions based on what we expect they know and are thinking. We don't always get this right—it's easy to...

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According to Amazonian folklore, the area's male river dolphins are shapeshifters (encantade), transforming at night into handsome young men who seduce and impregnate human women. The legend's origins may lie in the fact that dolphins have...

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A new large-scale study of crevasses on the Greenland Ice Sheet shows that those cracks are widening faster as the climate warms, which is likely to speed ice loss and global sea level rise. Crevasses are wedge-shaped fractures and cracks...

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The seventh test flight of SpaceX's gigantic Starship rocket came to a disappointing end a little more than two weeks ago. The in-flight failure of the rocket's upper stage, or ship, about eight minutes after launch on January 16 rained...

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Large language models like ChatGPT display conversational skills, but the problem is they don’t really understand the words they use. They are primarily systems that interact with data obtained from the real world but not the real world...

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Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research. These paper mills are profiting by undermining the literature that everyone from...

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly...

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A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers,...

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When we developed the ability to convert various cells into a stem cell, it held the promise of an entirely new type of therapy. Rather than getting the body to try to fix itself with its cells or deal with the complications of organ...

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An egg-cracking beam relies on a hyperelastic torque reversal mechanism similar to that used by mantis shrimp and jumping fleas. Credit: Seoul National University. An egg-cracking beam relies on a hyperelastic torque reversal...

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Starting a few days after the Trump inauguration, word spread within the research community that some grant spending might be on hold. On Monday, confirmation came in the form of a memo sent by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB):...

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Global warming caused mainly by burning of fossil fuels made the hot, dry and windy conditions that drove the recent deadly fires around Los Angeles about 35 times more likely to occur, an international team of scientists concluded in a...

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One of the new Trump administration's first national security directives aims to defend against missile and drone attacks targeting the United States, and several elements of the plan require an expansion of the US military's presence in...

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The Bayeux Tapestry famously depicts the events leading up to the 1066 Norman Conquest of England, in which William the Conqueror defeated Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, at the Battle of Hastings. Two scenes in particular...

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The Energy Information Agency has now released data on the performance of the US's electric grid over the first 11 months of 2024 and will be adding the final month soon (and a month is very little time for anything to change significantly...

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The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a...

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One of the most frequently asked questions about quantum computers is a simple one: When will they be useful? If you talk to people in the field, you'll generally get a response in the form of another question: useful for what? Quantum...

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Welcome to Edition 7.28 of the Rocket Report! After last week's jam-packed action in the launch business, things are a bit quieter this week. Much of the space world's attention has turned to Washington as the Trump administration takes...

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Although fans of A Song of Ice and Fire might still be hankering for the long-delayed next book in the series, bestselling sci-fi/fantasy author George R.R. Martin has instead added a different item to his long list of publications: a...

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Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are puzzling phenomena because their details are so difficult to resolve, and observations to date have been inconsistent. Astronomers added another piece to the puzzle with the detection of an FRB that seems to...