The white whales join the short, contested list of animals that see themselves. In hours of underwater video footage from a New York aquarium, a beluga whale named Natasha stretches her neck, pirouettes, nods, and shakes her head in front of a two-way mirror. Her daughter Maris does much…
SpaceX has more to prove before flying Starship all the way to low-Earth orbit. SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster Friday, with mostly positive results. The powerful rocket, propelled by 33 methane-fueled main engines, climbed away from SpaceX’s Starbase launch…
A formal petition to the US government calls for sanctions on Chinese seafood imports. For migrant workers trapped onboard Chinese distant water fishing fleets, cutting the fins off sharks as they writhe violently on rusted decks in the Indian Ocean isn’t accidental. It’s an intentional and lucrative act that…
The first data from 2026 seem to indicate that last year was an oddity. Last year, the first few months of data from the US grid suggested that fears of a data-center-driven surge in demand were becoming a reality. Demand had risen by about 3 percent, triggering a surge…
Engineers could make another attempt to launch Starship as soon as Friday evening. SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for…
The differences seen here could be throwing off how we study planetary atmospheres. WASP-94A b is a hot, tidally locked gas giant orbiting close to one of the stars in a binary system roughly 690 light-years away from Earth. In a new Science study, scientists led by Sagnick Mukherjee,…
“As a bonus, it captured Mars images from a rare perspective.” Not quite halfway through a six-year sojourn through the Solar System, a NASA spacecraft used a close encounter with Mars last week as a dress rehearsal for its arrival at the Solar System’s largest metal asteroid in 2029.…
In the process, Colossal may have handed a useful tool to developmental biology. On Tuesday, biotech startup Colossal announced its newest development on the road to its announced goal: reversing the extinction of species, in this case, avian species. The development itself is essentially an artificial eggshell, one that…
“How in the hell do I get more science into space? That is my goal.” There are more opportunities to access space than ever, thanks to a bevy of commercial rockets, some with reusable boosters, led by SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9. So why is NASA launching fewer telescopes and…
Both tools generate hypotheses; one goes on to analyze some of the data. On Tuesday, Nature released two papers describing AI systems intended to help scientists develop and test hypotheses. One, Google’s Co-Scientist, is designed as what they term “scientist in the loop,” meaning researchers are regularly applying their…
