There are sound engineering reasons to use the same approach SpaceX uses with the Falcon 9. The race to field China’s first reusable launch vehicle is far less predictable than a similar competition that played out in the United States a decade ago. There was never any real question…
Prehistoric mining in the Pyrenees, a new species of tiny blue octopus, slapstick acoustics, 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…
I tried to explain OpenAI’s solution more clearly than OpenAI did. In mid-May, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 years. OpenAI gave several mathematicians early access…
As temperatures rise, some creatures pick fights while others struggle to learn. On a blazing hot day in South Africa, female southern pied babblers can’t think straight. The medium-sized black-and-white birds are trying to get at tasty mealworms behind a see-through barrier. On cooler days, the birds can quickly…
A new book looks into the long history of people who have opposed vaccines. Stanley Plotkin, 93, was instrumental in developing a number of vaccines over the course of his career. He recently said that he’s “beginning to regret having lived so long—because we’re going downhill.” How could we…
Peer review now optional, political staff would screen grants for forbidden topics. Last August, the Trump administration issued an executive order intended to fundamentally alter how grant funding is handled by the US government. Under the system that had made the US a scientific superpower, peer reviewers rated the…
They seem to reorganize their tissues and then just keep living. Organs, arms, appendages, and other complex tissues usually decay rapidly when they’re separated from their host. Over the years, biologists have seen some success with keeping them alive outside of the body—organ transplants depend on it—but it has…
If it scales up, it can help us diversify our sources of a key element. While we make batteries based on many different chemistries, nothing has approached the massive scale at which we can produce lithium batteries. That scale makes the economics of lithium-ion batteries hard to compete with.…
Amazon is turning a corner with its launch providers, but ULA’s Vulcan remains grounded. It was less than two months ago that the third flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket left a customer’s payload in an unusable orbit. Investigators have now identified the cause of the failure,…
Iron-rich immune cells in the liver may act as sensors for magnetic fields, serving as an internal compass. Scientists have long known that migrating birds and homing pigeons navigate in part by sensing the Earth’s magnetic fields, especially at night or in overcast conditions when visual landmarks or sunshine…
