Pure Science

Ars Technica

On Tuesday, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued a now familiar order: because of a supposed energy emergency, a coal plant scheduled for closure would be forced to remain open. This time, the order targeted one of the three units...

Ars Technica

Freedom of speech is a foundational principle of healthy democracies and hence a primary target for aspiring authoritarians, who typically try to squash dissent. There is a point where the threat from authorities is sufficiently severe...

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On Monday, the ACLU announced that it and other organizations representing medical researchers had reached a settlement in their suit against the federal government over grant applications that had been rejected under a policy that has...

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Lobsters are generally notable for their large claws, which can serve as a deterrent to any predators. But there's a whole family of spiny lobsters that lack these claws. They tend to ward off predators by forming large groups that...

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Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique  for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging...

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The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional...

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Earthquakes, volcanic eruption, eclipses, meteor showers, and many other natural phenomena have always been part of life on Earth. In ancient cultures that predated science, such events were often memorialized in myths and legends. There...

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Black holes have long captured the imagination of both scientists and the general public. These exotic objects—once thought to be merely hypothetical—have also conceptually inspired countless artists all over the world. A generous sampling...

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Tis the season when professional Santas are in peak demand, but many who choose this line of work often view it as a higher calling and maintain some aspects of the identity all year round—even those who don't fit the stereotypical popular...

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For the second time this month, a Chinese rocket designed for reuse successfully soared into low-Earth orbit on its first flight Monday, defying the questionable odds that burden the debuts of new launch vehicles. The first Long March 12A...

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Tory Bruno, a veteran engineer and aerospace industry executive, has resigned from the top job at United Launch Alliance after more than a decade competing against the growing dominance of SpaceX, the company announced Monday. The news of...

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On Monday, the US Department of the Interior announced that it was pausing the leases on all five offshore wind sites currently under construction in the US. The move comes despite the fact that these projects already have installed...

Ars Technica

Caroline Muller looks at clouds differently than most people. Where others may see puffy marshmallows, wispy cotton candy or thunderous gray objects storming overhead, Muller sees fluids flowing through the sky. She visualizes how air...

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The trade-off between quality and quantity is a fundamental economic dilemma. Now, a team of British, American, and Japanese researchers describes how it applies to biology, as well. They have discovered that this dilemma most likely...

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SEATTLE—The last coal-fired power plant in Washington state was set to go cold at the end of the year. It would then switch to natural gas, cutting carbon emissions in half. The shutdown had been in the works for 15 years and was mandated...

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Welcome to Edition 8.23 of the Rocket Report! Several new rockets made their first flights this year. Blue Origin’s New Glenn was the most notable debut, with a successful inaugural launch in January followed by an impressive second flight...

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Four small satellites rode a Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle into orbit from Virginia early Thursday, beginning a government-funded technology demonstration mission to test the performance of a new spacecraft design. The satellites were...

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It probably sucked to be a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian’s Wall circa the third century CE. W.H. Auden imagined the likely harsh conditions in his poem “Roman Wall Blues,” in which a soldier laments enduring wet wind and rain with “lice...

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There have been a number of high-profile cases where scientific papers have had to be retracted because they were filled with AI-generated slop—the most recent coming just two weeks ago. These instances raise serious questions about the...

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When the Perseverance rover arrived on Mars nearly five years ago, NASA officials thought the next American lander to take aim on the red planet would be taking shape by now. At the time, the leaders of the space agency expected this next...

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If you’re human, you’ve probably hollered a curse word ot two (or three) when barking your shin on a table edge or hitting your thumb with a hammer. Perhaps you’ve noticed that this seems to lessen your pain. There’s a growing body of...

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Physicists at the University of Amsterdam came up with a really cool bit of Christmas decor: a miniature 3D-printed Christmas tree, a mere 8 centimeters tall, made of ice, without any refrigeration equipment or other freezing technology,...

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On Tuesday, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, announced that a major climate research center will be “broken up.” The National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, is a significant contributor to...

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As the Trump administration makes announcement after announcement about its efforts to promote the US fossil fuel industry, the industry isn’t exactly jumping at new opportunities. Some high-profile oil and gas industry leaders and...

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A few weeks ago, technicians inside a cavernous clean room in Maryland made the final connection to complete assembly of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Parts of this new observatory, named for NASA’s first chief astronomer,...

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Utah Gov. Spencer Cox believes his state needs more power—a lot more. By some estimates, Utah will require as much electricity in the next five years as it generated all last century to meet the demands of a growing population as well as...

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For the first time, global governments have agreed to widespread international trade bans and restrictions for sharks and rays being driven to extinction. Last week, more than 70 shark and ray species, including oceanic whitetip sharks,...

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Modern bionic hand prostheses nearly match their natural counterparts when it comes to dexterity, degrees of freedom, and capability. And many amputees who tried advanced bionic hands apparently didn’t like them. “Up to 50 percent of...

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A startup established three years ago to churn out a new class of high-power satellites has raised $250 million to ramp up production at its Southern California factory. The company, named K2, announced the cash infusion on Thursday. K2’s...

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in critical condition. This year, the premier public health agency had its funding brutally cut and staff gutted, its mission sabotaged, and its headquarters riddled with literal bullets....

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Since the 1990s, physicists have pondered the tantalizing possibility of an exotic fourth type of neutrino, dubbed the “sterile” neutrino, that doesn’t interact with regular matter at all, apart from its fellow neutrinos, perhaps. But...

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NASA has lost contact with one its three spacecraft orbiting Mars, the agency announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, a second Mars orbiter is perilously close to running out of fuel, and the third mission is running well past its warranty. Ground...

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Heat-reddened clay, fire-cracked stone, and fragments of pyrite mark where Neanderthals gathered around a campfire 400,000 years ago in what’s now Suffolk, England. Based on chemical analysis of the sediment at the site, along with the...

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On Monday, US District Court Judge Patti Saris vacated a Trump executive order that brought a halt to all offshore wind power development, as well as some projects on land. That order had called for the suspension of all permitting for...

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Back in 2023, we reported on MIT scientists’ conclusion that the ancient Romans employed “hot mixing” with quicklime, among other strategies, to make their famous concrete, giving the material self-healing functionality. The only snag was...

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Despite claims of environmental leadership and promises to preserve the Amazon rainforest ahead of COP30, Brazil is stripping away protections for the region’s vital ecosystems faster than workers dismantled the tents that housed the...

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Near the end of the film A House of Dynamite, a fictional American president portrayed by Idris Elba sums up the theory of nuclear deterrence. “Just being ready is the point, right?” Elba says. “It keeps people in check. Keeps the world...

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Popular genetics tests can’t tell you much about your dog’s personality, according to a recent study. A team of geneticists recently found no connection between simple genetic variants and behavioral traits in more than 3,200 dogs, even...

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CHANCAY, Peru—The elevator doors leading to the fifth-floor control center open like stage curtains onto a theater-sized screen. This “Operations Productivity Dashboard” instantaneously displays a battery of data: vehicle locations,...

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The Black Death ravaged medieval Western Europe, ultimately wiping out roughly one-third of the population. Scientists have identified the bacterium responsible and its likely origins, but certain specifics of how and why it spread to...

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As global warming accelerates, about 480 million people in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula face intensifying and in some places unsurvivable heat, as well as drought, famine, and the risk of mass displacement, the World...

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Welcome to Edition 8.21 of the Rocket Report! We’re back after the Thanksgiving holiday with more launch news. Most of the big stories over the last couple of weeks came from abroad. Russian rockets and launch pads didn’t fare so well....

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Roughly two years ago, Sam Altman tweeted that AI systems would be capable of superhuman persuasion well before achieving general intelligence—a prediction that raised concerns about the influence AI could have over democratic elections....

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Necrobotics is a field of engineering that builds robots out of a mix of synthetic materials and animal body parts. It has produced micro-grippers with pneumatically operated legs taken from dead spiders and walking robots based on...

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Just a tiny amount of fentanyl, the equivalent of a few grains of sand, is enough to stop a person’s breathing. The synthetic opioid is tasteless, odorless, and invisible when mixed with other substances, and drug users are often unaware...

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On Friday, Vinay Prasad—the Food and Drug Administration’s chief medical and scientific officer and its top vaccine regulator—emailed a stunning memo to staff that quickly leaked to the press. Without evidence, Prasad claimed COVID-19...

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The fossil and genetic evidence agree that modern humans originated in Africa. The most genetically diverse human populations—the groups that have had the longest time to pick up novel mutations—live there today. But the history of what...

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The US Department of Energy has approved an $8.6 million grant that will allow the nation’s first utility-led geothermal heating and cooling network to double in size. Gas and electric utility Eversource Energy completed the first phase of...

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China’s first attempt to land an orbital-class rocket may have ended in a fiery crash, but the company responsible for the mission had a lot to celebrate with the first flight of its new methane-fueled launcher. LandSpace, a decade-old...

Ars Technica

On Wednesday, three NASA astronomers released an analysis showing that several planned orbital telescopes would see their images criss-crossed by planned satellite constellations, such as a fully expanded Starlink and its competitors....