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…
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…
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…
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…
Rare event suggests relational dynamics may play a role in collective violence, along with cultural markers. In the 1970s, the late Jane Goodall observed a community of chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, breaking into two factions; the males in one group ended up killing all the males in the rival…
“I’m actually getting chills right now just thinking about it. My palms are sweating.” On the home stretch of their nine-day mission, the four astronauts flying aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft are just beginning to reflect on their experience of flying beyond the Moon. Their memories of Monday’s encounter with…
A World War II-era policy is stopping old coal plants from closing. At one time, the US electricity grid ran mostly on coal. But coal-fired power plants have steadily been decommissioned. Power producers found the plants were too expensive to operate and carried risks tied to toxic air pollution,…
“I think the biggest value here is the PR. I mean, it’s getting the public excited.” The data pipeline from NASA’s Artemis II mission opened to full blast a few hours after looping behind the far side of the Moon on Monday night, when the Orion spacecraft established a…
“Humans have probably not evolved to see what we’re seeing. It is truly hard to describe. It is amazing.” After staring at the Moon for almost eight hours Monday, the commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission finally ran out of ways to describe what he was seeing. “No matter…
