Pure Science

Ars Technica

Rice, the world’s most consumed grain, will become increasingly toxic as the atmosphere heats and as carbon dioxide emissions rise, potentially putting billions of people at risk of cancers and other diseases, according to new research...

Ars Technica

The RoboBee lands on a leaf. Credit: Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory The RoboBee lands on a leaf. Credit: Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory Several years ago, Harvard University roboticist Robert Wood made headlines when his lab...

Ars Technica

There is a signal, born in the earliest days of the cosmos. It’s weak. It’s faint. It can barely register on even the most sensitive of instruments. But it contains a wealth of information about the formation of the first stars, the first...

Ars Technica

More than 45 million people in the US are fans of bowling, with national competitions awarding millions of dollars. Bowlers usually rely on instinct and experience, earned through lots and lots of practice, to boost their strike...

Ars Technica

Dig deep on Google Earth and you'll inevitably find a surprise or two. Maybe you're looking at far-flung islands in the middle of an ocean or checking in on something closer to home. A few years ago, online sleuths found an image of a B-2...

Ars Technica

The Trump administration has been using federal research funding as a cudgel. The government has blocked billions of dollars in research funds and threatened to put a hold on even more in order to compel universities to adopt what it...

Ars Technica

In one way or another, the Lunar Gateway has lingered around the periphery of NASA's human exploration program since the Obama administration. Back then, the elements that eventually coalesced into the Gateway were geared toward a nebulous...

Ars Technica

The Li-ion batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric cars are usually packed in rigid, sealed enclosures that prevent stresses from damaging their components and keep air from coming into contact with their flammable and...

Ars Technica

Dolphins are generally regarded as some of the smartest creatures on the planet. Research has shown they can cooperate, teach each other new skills, and even recognize themselves in a mirror. For decades, scientists have attempted to make...

Ars Technica

Federal scientists responsible for monitoring the health of West Coast fisheries are cleaning office bathrooms and reconsidering critical experiments after the Department of Commerce failed to renew their lab’s contracts for hazardous...

Ars Technica

The colonial victory against the British in the American Revolutionary War was far from a predetermined outcome. In addition to good strategy and the timely appearance of key allies like the French, Continental soldiers relied on several...

Ars Technica

Kevin Peterson is a "nose" for his own perfume company, Sfumato Fragrances, by day. By night, Sfumato's retail store in Detroit, Michigan, transforms into Peterson's craft cocktail bar, Castalia, where he is chief mixologist and designs...

Ars Technica

Concerns about AI's energy use have a lot of people looking into ways to cut down on its power requirements. Many of these focus on hardware and software approaches that are pretty straightforward extensions of existing technologies. But a...

Ars Technica

Welcome to Edition 7.39 of the Rocket Report! Not getting your launch fix? Buckle up. We're on the cusp of a boom in rocket launches as three new megaconstellations have either just begun or will soon begin deploying thousands of...

Ars Technica

Back in 2023, we reported on the unveiling of the first full-size 3D digital scan of the remains of the RMS Titanic—a "digital twin" that captured the wreckage in unprecedented detail. Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, and Atlantic...

Ars Technica

A family altar in the Maya city of Tikal offers a glimpse into events in an enclave of the city’s foreign overlords in the wake of a local coup. Archaeologists recently unearthed the altar in a quarter of the Maya city of Tikal that had...

Ars Technica

Shortly after its inauguration, the Trump administration has made no secret that it isn't especially interested in funding research. Before January's end, major science agencies had instituted pauses on research funding, and grant funding...

Ars Technica

Even the tiniest of living things are capable of some amazing forms of locomotion, and some come with highly sophisticated sensor suites and manage to source their energy from the environment. Attempts to approach this sort of flexibility...

Ars Technica

As President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders Tuesday aimed at keeping coal power alive in the United States, he repeatedly blamed his predecessor, Democrats and environmental regulations for the industry’s dramatic...

Ars Technica

Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world, counting many scientists among its fans. Naturally those scientists are sometimes drawn to study their beloved beverage from various angles with an eye toward achieving the perfect...

Ars Technica

On Monday, biotech company Colossal announced what it views as its first successful de-extinction: the dire wolf. These large predators were lost during the Late Pleistocene extinctions that eliminated many large land mammals from the...

Ars Technica

When Maureen Long talks to the public about her work, she likes to ask her audience to close their eyes and think of a landscape with incredible geology. She hears a lot of the same suggestions: Iceland, the Grand Canyon, the Himalayas....

Ars Technica

The start-up Colossal Biosciences aims to use gene-editing technology to bring back the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. Recently, the company achieved major milestones: last year, they generated stem cells for the Asian elephant,...

Ars Technica

The US Space Force announced Friday it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin for $13.7 billion in contracts to deliver the Pentagon's most critical military to orbit into the early 2030s. These missions will launch the...

Ars Technica

Plant cells are surrounded by an intricately structured protective coat called the cell wall. It’s built of cellulose microfibrils intertwined with polysaccharides like hemicellulose or pectin. We have known what plant cells look like...

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The white-necked jacobin (Florisuga mellivora) is a jewel-toned hummingbird found in the neotropical lowlands of South America and the Caribbean. It shimmers blue and green in the sunlight as it flits from flower to flower, a tiny...

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For two decades, farmer John Burk has been working to improve the soil on his farm in Michigan, taking a few extra steps to make it more resilient and productive. His efforts have paid off. “When we have the dry, hot summers or lack of...

Ars Technica

Bonobos, great apes related to us and chimpanzees that live in the Republic of Congo, communicate with vocal calls including peeps, hoots, yelps, grunts, and whistles. Now, a team of Swiss scientists led by Melissa Berthet, an evolutionary...

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Humans have practiced some form of yodeling since at least the 13th century, when Marco Polo encountered Tibetan monks on his travels who used the vocal technique for long-distance communication. It's since morphed into a distinctive...

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SpaceX is having trouble with Starship's upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket's enormous booster. The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship's first...

Ars Technica

A study released on Wednesday finds that a live-virus vaccine that limits shingles symptoms was associated with a drop in the risk for dementia when it was introduced. The work took advantage of the fact that the National Health Service...

Ars Technica

Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) are tremendously fond of fermented foodstuffs. Technically, it's the yeast they crave, produced by yummy rotting fruit, but they can consume quite a lot of ethanol as a result of that fruity diet. Yes,...

Ars Technica

On Wednesday, a team of researchers from China used a paper published in Nature to describe a 32-bit RISC-V processor built using molybdenum disulfide instead of silicon as the semiconductor. For those not up on their chemistry, molybdenum...

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Actor Val Kilmer—star of Top Gun, The Doors, and Batman Forever, among other roles—has died at the age of 65 of pneumonia, Deadline Hollywood reports. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2015 and while chemotherapy and two...

Ars Technica

There are a remarkable number of commercial fusion power startups, considering that it's a technology that's built a reputation for being perpetually beyond the horizon. Many of them focus on radically new technologies for heating and...

Ars Technica

Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire. The private...

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never 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, we're...

Ars Technica

The first flight of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket didn't last long on Sunday. The booster's nine engines switched off as the rocket cartwheeled upside-down and fell a short distance from its Arctic launch pad in Norway, punctuating the...

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A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer Indiana...

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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has detected the largest organic (carbon-containing) molecules ever found on the red planet. The discovery is one of the most significant findings in the search for evidence of past life on Mars. This is...

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Imagine working with special cameras that capture light your eyes can't even see—ultraviolet rays that cause sunburn, infrared heat signatures that reveal hidden writing, or specific wavelengths that plants use for photosynthesis. Or...

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On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order that took aim at one of the US's foremost cultural and scientific institutions: the Smithsonian. Upset by exhibits that reference the role of racism, sexism, and more in the...

Ars Technica

Welcome to Edition 7.37 of the Rocket Report! It's been interesting to watch how quickly European officials have embraced ensuring they have a space launch capability independent of other countries. A few years ago, European government...

Ars Technica

It's no secret that "driving while black" is a real phenomenon. Study after study has shown that minority drivers are ticketed at a higher rate, and data from speed cameras suggests that it's not because they commit traffic violations more...

Ars Technica

Health Secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is slashing a total of 20,000 jobs across the Department of Health and Human Services—or about 24 percent of the workforce—in a sweeping overhaul said to improve efficiency...

Ars Technica

The growing energy use of AI has gotten a lot of people working on ways to make it less power hungry. One option is to develop processors that are a better match to the sort of computational needs of neural networks, which require many...

Ars Technica

The US Space Force celebrated its fifth birthday last year, when it boasted an annual budget of $29 billion, about 3.5 percent of the Pentagon's overall funding level. On March 15, President Donald Trump signed a stopgap spending bill that...

Ars Technica

On March 5, Do No Harm, an organization that advocates against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in medicine, among other issues, sued the American Chemical Society for its Scholars Program, which provides financial support to...

Ars Technica

“Where is everybody!?” It was around 1950. UFO mania had recently ramped up across the world, with dozens of reported sightings of strange flying machines fueling rampant speculation regarding their origins. The eminent physicist Enrico...

Ars Technica

The European Space Agency is inviting proposals to inject competition into the European launch market, an important step toward fostering a dynamic multiplayer industry officials hope, one day, will mimic that of the United States. The...