“Black hole stars,” making cookies from plastic, tiny sound-powered drones, and more. It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks.…
NASA’s cost estimate for SR-1 Freedom is $2.1 billion, but that doesn’t include the helicopters. For the first time in more than 30 years, NASA has no firm plans to send any new landers or rovers to Mars. Instead, the agency’s near-term focus at the red planet is on…
Finding reveals an overlooked way that water can damage surfaces. The standard explanation for why rain causes corrosion is that water carries dissolved salts and acids to a surface, constant drumming of raindrops abrades whatever protective coating is on it, and oxygen does the rest. Nearly all our tools…
“One more warning sign here of what we’re facing in a warmer world.” Every few years, El Niño or its cool counterpart, La Niña, shifts rainfall across the tropics, dries out Australia, floods parts of Peru, and rearranges the weather on most of the planet. The two are the…
“We would need over half a million 4K TVs to fully display the single Roman image from our largest survey.” NASA’s $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, equipped with a 300-megapixel camera sighted through a refurbished spy mirror, launched Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a…
Study: Land use is the biggest factor in determining decomposition rates of organic cotton underpants. A thousand people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health in 25…
“We built this city on good cacao” does have a nice ring to it. A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia state included cacao from Central America. Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta—contained traces of cacao,…
Messing with the genetic code might have gotten a bit easier to do. The genetic code is what life everywhere uses to convert the information contained in DNA into specific protein sequences. With minor variations, the same genetic code is used by every living thing on Earth, suggesting it…
Understanding unique photochemistry of such materials will help in conservation, storage, and exhibition. Fashionistas of a certain age no doubt remember the late designer Stephen Sprouse, who gave Blondie’s Debbie Harry her distinctive Bowery punk style. Sprouse’s first collections in the mid-1980s made a major splash, melding graffiti prints,…
Image changes that would get a paper retracted are widespread among suppliers. Antibodies play a central role in your body’s immune defense. But they’re also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing…
