The US Space Force might move additional payloads off of ULA’s grounded Vulcan rocket. Welcome to Edition 8.35 of the Rocket Report! The headlines this week are again dominated by the big changes afoot in NASA’s exploration program, with the announcement of a Moon base and a nuclear-powered rocket…
Subjects who interacted with AI tools were more likely to think they were right, less likely to resolve conflicts. We all need a little validation now and then from friends or family, but sometimes too much validation can backfire—and the same is true of AI chatbots. There have been…
This will not be turning up in the church rummage sale. Recent repairs to a centuries-old tile floor at a church in the Netherlands may have revealed the skeleton of the French Musketeer d’Artagnan. Today, Charles de Batz de Castlemore, Count d’Artagnan, is best known as a character in…
For much of the Western US, winter 2026 was the year snow never came. Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply…
Only one US-built nuclear reactor has ever flown in space, and that was more than 60 years ago. NASA’s announcement Tuesday that it will “pause” work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention…
Study links two crises: Climate change and antibiotic-resistant infections. For as long as we’ve known that soil bacteria manufacture molecular weapons to fight each other, we’ve been swiping their battle plans. In clinics and hospitals, those turf-war weapons have become miraculous drugs of modern medicine—antibiotics—that blow away otherwise deadly…
Appointee list is in keeping with the administration’s hostility toward science. PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is generally not a high-profile group. It tends to be noticed when things go wrong, such as when the PCAST head named by Biden had to resign due…
Hydrothermal carbonization can directly convert sloppy stillage into hard or activated carbon. Bourbon is a multi-billion-dollar market, but the American barrel-aged whiskey also produces a lot of wasted grain at distilleries. Chemists at the University of Kentucky developed a method to transform that stillage into electrodes and used those…
Too much hardware was allowed to disconnect right at the edge of normal conditions. Roughly a year ago, Spain and Portugal went dark when the electrical grid of the entire Iberian Peninsula failed. While the grid operators did a heroic job of restarting the grid quickly, there were obvious…
Opponents say the proposed rule would be a giveaway to the timber industry. When the Trump administration announced plans last year to rescind a rule limiting roadbuilding and timber harvests on millions of acres of national forests and grasslands, officials called the repeal necessary to prevent and manage wildfires.…
