“I can’t imagine a better crew that just completed a perfect mission right now.” Slamming into the atmosphere at more than 30 times the speed of sound, NASA’s Orion spacecraft blazed a trail over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, returning home with four astronauts and safely capping humanity’s first…
A now-vanished plate under North America may open the crust below Yellowstone. North America wouldn’t look much like it currently does without a tectonic plate that has largely been lost to the Earth’s geological history. The Farallon plate, which has since largely vanished underneath North America, helped build the…
Algorithms, not drivers, are deciding how hard to accelerate, and that’s no good. Formula 1 is enjoying something of an unexpected break right now. The war in the Middle East saw the cancellation of F1 races that were due to be held this month in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.…
Windows Insider builds remain confusing, but they should be more predictable. Microsoft says it hears the complaints people have about the current state of Windows, and it wants to fix them. One of those fixes is another overhaul for its Windows Insider Program, the public beta system that Microsoft…
Dense drops of oobleck with high shear rates spread out like a liquid before stiffening into a solid. Mixing corn starch and water in appropriate amounts produces a slurry that is liquid when stirred slowly but hardens when you punch it—a substance colorfully dubbed “oobleck.” (The name derives from…
An individual plan now cost $15.99 per month, and the free tier comes with buggy ads. Over the years, YouTube has evolved from a source of Rickrolls and cat videos to a platform for some of the Internet’s most popular streaming content. Today, it costs more than ever to…
Supposed “first octopus” was something else entirely. Pohlsepia mazonensis, a visually underwhelming fossil from Illinois, fundamentally broke our understanding of cephalopod evolution. Described in 2000 and hailed as the oldest known octopus in the fossil record, the specimen dated back to the late Carboniferous period, roughly 311 to 306…
AI tools could help moderators sift through mountains of suspicious incidents These days, it seems like every tech company and their corporate parent is looking to squeeze AI tools and features into their products, whether they’re wanted or not. So when files with names and functions referencing a “SteamGPT”…
After leaks on Artemis I and II, Orion’s next flight to the Moon will need new valves. Apart from pesky issues with the spacecraft’s toilet and waste disposal system, most of the Artemis II mission has proceeded like clockwork. NASA has made few changes to the flight plan since…
Improved gene editing process reactivates the fetal version of a hemoglobin gene. Almost as soon as researchers started exploring the capabilities of the CRISPR/Cas9 system, they recognized its potential use in targeted gene editing. But the intervening decades have seen slow progress as people worked to determine how to…
