“We will likely have similar concerns and discussions when China fields its Starlink-like constellation.” One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a “joint plan” by China and Russia to “defeat Elon Musk’s Starlink.” The story was…
Private buyers are increasingly outbidding museums for fossils. Forget the sale of the century. The auction house Sotheby’s has geared up for the sale of the epoch. On July 14 it opened live bidding on assorted fossils, but the pièce de résistance is lot 20, a rare 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus…
Conductive ink is painted directly onto the skin in colorful custom designs, drying into working electrodes. Credit: Wanqing Zhang Credit: Wanqing Zhang Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have developed a novel conductive ink that can be painted directly onto the skin in colorful custom designs, turning into a functional…
This flight will put Starship under higher pressure and test out new Starlink satellites in orbit. The next test flight of SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster could take off as soon as Thursday, and much of the hour-long mission will look a lot like the last Starship…
New study confirms 2024 “momentum flux theory” on how angular momentum of water flows drives rotation. Watering your lawn in the summer can be both pragmatic and fun with so-called “silly sprinklers,” designed to create amusing loops and spirals of water jets. And there’s some fascinating physics at work…
New climate evidence adds context to these long voyages. The same question drives both the plot of Moana and decades of archaeological research: Why, after centuries of relative stability, did Polynesian voyagers suddenly begin settling islands thousands of kilometers away across the Pacific? The latest Moana movie is a…
It’s unclear how the planet avoided its star’s bloated red giant stage. WD 1856 b is the only confirmed case of a planet that survived the death of a Sun-like star. It’s a Jupiter-size world orbiting a white dwarf—the burned-out remnant of a Sun-like star. Now, a team of…
For the first time since 1995, the Bureau of Land Management is rewriting its grazing regulations. The federal government is rewriting its rules governing ranching on public lands to increase the number of cattle, sheep, and other livestock grazing on 155 million acres in the West, an area twice…
Reinforcement learning uses error information to adjust control algorithms. There are some obvious big picture issues that stand between us and useful quantum computing. Issues like whether we can make enough high-quality hardware qubits to connect into the error-corrected logical qubits we need, and how we generate the states…
The Quest shipwreck is in worse shape than expected, but it has turned into a thriving marine ecosystem. Back in 2024, we reported on the discovery of the Quest shipwreck, the polar exploration vessel that served Arctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton on his last voyage. Shackleton died before reaching…
