“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…
Congress rejected huge cuts to science in 2026, but Trump is trying again. On Friday, the Trump administration released its proposed budget for 2027. The budget blueprint includes significant cuts to NASA, but it targets even more severe limits for other science-focused agencies, with no agencies spared. The document…
Congress will likely reject the White House’s NASA cuts, just as it did last year. President Donald Trump released a budget blueprint on Friday calling for a 23 percent cut to NASA’s budget, two days after the agency launched four astronauts on the first crewed lunar mission in more…
Ice Age hunter-gatherer “were intentionally relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways.” Native Americans have been playing with dice in games of chance for more than 12,000 years, according to a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity. And the oldest examples of Native American dice predate…
Experiments show large majorities uncritically accepting “faulty” AI answers. When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect…
A receptor that’s used to find prey is also activated by progesterone. Octopuses are one of the most alien creatures on Earth. The lack of bones makes them amazing shapeshifters, most of them can change color like chameleons, and they pump blue copper-based blood through their bodies using three…
Collection of fossils includes Ediacaran, Cambrian species, suggesting a transition. The details of how animal life began are a bit murky. Most of the groups familiar today are present in the Cambrian, a period when they rapidly diversified, with familiar features evolving alongside bizarre creatures with no obvious modern…
And solar power accounted for about three quarters of the renewables. On Wednesday, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) released its numbers on what was built in 2025. And much as we saw in the US, solar power is the primary driver of change. The numbers show that the…
Sperm gets lost in space; raccoons solve puzzles; the physics of folding a crepe; 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…
Pair instability supernovae create a “mass gap” in black holes. Many of the early exoplanet discoveries were exciting on their own, confirming that there really were strange new worlds out in the Universe. But over time, our focus has shifted more toward numbers, as we began using the frequency…
