Pure Science

Ars Technica

When Aristotle claimed that humans differ from other animals because they have the ability to be rational, he understood rational to mean that we could form our views and beliefs based on evidence, and that we could reconsider that...

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Edmontosaurus annectens, a large herbivore duck-billed dinosaur that lived toward the end of the Cretaceous period, was discovered back in 1908 in east-central Wyoming by C.H. Sternberg, a fossil collector. The skeleton, later housed at...

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Wrapping up 204 days in orbit, three Chinese astronauts flew back to Earth aboard a Shenzhou spacecraft Friday, leaving three crewmates behind on the Tiangong space station with a busted lifeboat. Commander Chen Dong, concluding his third...

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Our best friends come in a fantastic array of shapes and sizes; a Borzoi looks nothing like a Boston terrier, except for a certain fundamental, ineffable (except to taxonomists) doggyness about them. And it’s been that way almost from the...

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A young woolly mammoth now known as Yuka was frozen in the Siberian permafrost for about 40,000 years before it was discovered by local tusk hunters in 2010. The hunters soon handed it over to scientists, who were excited to see its...

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A Chinese plant scientist at the University of Michigan, who drew national attention in June 2025 when she was arrested and accused along with another Chinese scientist of smuggling a crop-damaging fungus into the US, pleaded guilty on...

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The rocket company founded a quarter-century ago by billionaire Jeff Bezos made history Thursday with the pinpoint landing of an 18-story-tall rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean. The on-target touchdown came nine minutes...

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Standard brain implants use electrodes that penetrate the gray matter to stimulate and record the activity of neurons. These typically need to be put in place via a surgical procedure. To go around that need, a team of researchers led by...

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Science fiction has long speculated about the possibility of first contact with an alien species from a distant world and how we might be able to communicate with them. But what if we simply don’t have enough common ground for that to even...

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Mars is cold, parched, and extremely dusty. Powerful gusts of wind kick up literal tons of reddish dust that often takes the form of whorls known as dust devils. These winds also shroud the planet in dust by lifting material from the...

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—Another Falcon 9 rocket fired off its launch pad here on Monday night, taking with it another 29 Starlink Internet satellites to orbit. This was the 94th orbital launch from Florida’s Space Coast so far in 2025,...

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The second flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket was postponed again Wednesday as a supercharged wave of magnetized plasma from the Sun enveloped the Earth, triggering colorful auroral displays and concerns over...

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The end of the year is usually a busy time in the quantum computing arena, as companies often try to announce that they’ve reached major milestones before the year wraps up. This year has been no exception. And while not all of these...

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Scientists have found that the 2023 marine heat wave caused “functional extinction” of two Acropora reef-building coral species living in the Florida Reef, which stretches from the Dry Tortugas National Park to Miami. “At this point, we do...

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A new simulation could help solve one of astronomy’s longstanding mysteries—how supermassive black holes formed so rapidly—along with a new one: What are the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) “little red dots?” Invisible leviathans lurk...

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The field of astrodynamics isn’t a magical discipline, but sometimes it seems trajectory analysts can pull a solution out of a hat. That’s what it took to save NASA’s ESCAPADE mission from a lengthy delay, and...

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James Dewey Watson, who helped reveal DNA’s double-helix structure, kicked off the Human Genome Project, and became infamous for his racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive statements, has died. He was 97. His death was confirmed to The...

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The federal government shutdown, now in its 38th day, prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a temporary emergency order Thursday prohibiting commercial rocket launches from occurring during “peak hours” of air traffic. The...

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At a site in Kenya, archaeologists recently unearthed layer upon layer of stone stools from deposits that span 300,000 years, and include a period of intense environmental upheaval. The oldest tools at the site date back to 2.75 million...

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Welcome to Edition 8.18 of the Rocket Report! NASA is getting a heck of a deal from Blue Origin for launching the agency’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars. Blue Origin is charging NASA about $20 million for the launch on the company’s heavy-lift...

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The Event Horizon Telescope only recently gave us the first images of the environment immediately surrounding a black hole. Since then, it has been boosting the resolution and filling in the details of an environment dominated by the most...

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Quantum computers based on ions or atoms have one major advantage: the hardware itself isn’t manufactured, so there’s no device-to-device variability. Every atom is the same and should perform similarly every time. And since the qubits...

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It was probably always when, not if, Google would add its name to the list of companies intrigued by the potential of orbiting data centers. Google announced Tuesday a new initiative, named Project Suncatcher, to examine the feasibility of...

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Three Chinese astronauts were due to depart the Tiangong space station, reenter the atmosphere, and land in the remote desert of Inner Mongolia on Wednesday. Instead, officials ordered the crew to remain at the station while engineers...

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The Atlantic hurricane season is drawing to a close, and with the tropics quieting down for a winter slumber, the focus of forecasters turns to evaluating what worked and what did not during the preceding season. This year, the answers are...

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Many insect species hear using tympanal organs, membranes roughly resembling our eardrums but located on their legs. Grasshoppers, mantises, and moths all have them, and for decades, we thought that female stinkbugs of the Dinidoridae...

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US science always suffers during government shutdowns. Funding lapses send government scientists home without pay. Federal agencies suspend new grant opportunities, place expert review panels on hold, and stop collecting and analyzing...

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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. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year,...

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You’ll often hear plastic pollution referred to as a problem. But the reality is that it’s multiple problems. Depending on the properties we need, we form plastics out of different polymers, each of which is held together by a distinct...

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The road to the second flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lifting New Glenn rocket got a lot clearer Thursday night with a success test-firing of the launcher’s seven main engines on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida....

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Two chunks of ocher unearthed at ancient rock shelters in Ukraine were actually Neanderthal crayons, according to a recent study. The pair of artifacts, unearthed from layers 47,000 and 46,000 years old, showed signs of being deliberately...

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SpaceX on Thursday released the most detailed public update in nearly two years on its multibillion-dollar contract to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA, amid growing sentiment that China is likely to beat the United States back to the...

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For four decades, a frequently acrimonious debate has raged in paleontological circles about the correct taxonomy for a handful of rare fossil specimens. One faction insisted the fossils were juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex; the other argued...

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To the south of the Monte Cristo mountain range and west of Paymaster Canyon, a vast stretch of the Nevada desert has attracted modern-day prospectors chasing one of 21st-century America’s greatest investment booms. Solar power developers...

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In 2007’s The Bucket List, Jack Nicholson’s billionaire magnate is a fan of a luxury coffee called kopi luwak, only to be informed that the beans first pass through the digestive tracts of civets and are harvested from their feces prior to...

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It has been nearly one month since many parts of the federal government shut down after lawmakers missed a budget deadline at the end of September, but so far, NASA’s most critical operations have been unaffected by the political impasse...

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On Tuesday, Westinghouse announced that it had reached an agreement with the Trump administration that would purportedly see $80 billion of new nuclear reactors built in the US. And the government indicated that it had finalized plans for...

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Hurricane Melissa made landfall in southwestern Jamaica, near New Hope, on Tuesday at 1 pm ET with staggeringly powerful sustained winds of 185 mph. In the National Hurricane Center update noting the precise landfall time and location,...

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A mixture of two types of pigment-producing cells undergoes diffusiophoretic transport to self-assemble into a hexagonal pattern. Credit: Siamak Mirfendereski and Ankur Gupta/CU Boulder A mixture of two types of pigment-producing...

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Hurricane Melissa will make landfall in southern Jamaica less than 24 hours from now, and it is likely to be the most catastrophic storm in the Caribbean island’s history. As it crawled across the northern Caribbean Sea on Monday morning,...

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For millennia, some of the world’s largest filter-feeding whales, including humpbacks, fin whales, and blue whales, have undertaken some of the longest migrations on earth to travel between their warm breeding grounds in the tropics to...

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One of the things that emerging diseases, including the COVID and Zika pandemics, have taught us is that it’s tough to keep up with infectious diseases in the modern world. Things like air travel can allow a virus to spread faster than our...

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There are three species of bats that eat birds. We know that because we have found feathers and other avian remains in their feces. What we didn’t know was how exactly they hunt birds, which are quite a bit heavier, faster, and stronger...

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In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte led a disastrous military campaign into Moscow. The death toll was devastating: Out of some 615,000 men, only about 110,000 survivors returned. (Napoleon abandoned his army in early December to return home on a...

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You need to go up—way up—to fully appreciate the changes underway at the White House this week. Demolition crews starting tearing down the East Wing of the presidential mansion Tuesday to clear room for the construction of a new $300...

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Welcome to Edition 8.16 of the Rocket Report! The 10th anniversary of SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 rocket landing is coming up at the end of this year. We’re still waiting for a second company to bring back an orbital-class booster from space...

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The end of the dinosaurs was clearly linked to an asteroid impact that brought the Cretaceous period to a close. But the details of their end have remained a matter of debate since the impact crater was discovered. There is a lot of...

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The director of a federal health institute that has arguably produced two of the most controversial government studies in recent years has accepted a new federal role to advance the goals of the Make America Healthy Again movement....

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Australia’s First Peoples may or may not have hunted the continent’s megafauna to extinction, but they definitely collected fossils. A team of archaeologists examined the fossilized leg bone of an extinct kangaroo and realized that instead...

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Defense contractors are in full sales mode to win a piece of a potentially trillion-dollar pie for development of the Trump administration’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield. CEOs are touting their companies’ ability to rapidly spool up...