The AC culture wars may be solved by advances in environmentally friendly technology. If you’re reading this while the blinds are drawn against yet another heat wave and wondering whether it’s finally time to buy an air conditioner, you’re far from alone. At the end of June, as temperatures…
If Homo floresiensis wasn’t a fire-using hunter, its origins could be different than we thought. Until about 60,000 years ago, diminutive hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (affectionately nicknamed Hobbits for obvious reasons), shared the island of Flores with Komodo dragons, pygmy elephants, and giant rats. Based on the presence of…
“The Starship Pez dispenser demonstrates very smart industrial design and scale.” It wasn’t easy to find anyone outside of SpaceX clamoring for a rocket like Starship just 10 years ago. Today, the space industry can’t wait for Starship to finally deliver. With a payload capacity of more than 100…
“The BOHR mission serves as a pathfinder for future nuclear-powered spacecraft.” The proliferation of nuclear power in space got a little more real Tuesday with the launch of a small satellite developed by a Florida-based company specializing in nuclear micro-power technology. It’s a long way from launching a bona…
The crust expands at mid-ocean rifts. But how? One of the central features of plate tectonics is the formation of new crust at mid-ocean ridges. Part of the spreading process that drives continents apart, it was arguably the discovery of these ridges that drove widespread acceptance of plate tectonics…
Male dragonflies’ dramatic aerial combat maneuvers emerge from relatively simple vision-based rules. Credit: Samuel T. Fabian et al., 2026 Credit: Samuel T. Fabian et al., 2026 Male dragonflies are known to engage in mid-air “dogfights” to defend their breeding territory, using different maneuvers than those they employ when hunting…
Its issues with current nuclear safety standards are termed semantic, not physical. Last week, just before the US started its break for the July Fourth holiday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed a new rule that would change how it regulated exposure to radiation. The Trump administration has been…
It will take several weeks for the Link spacecraft to rendezvous with NASA’s Swift observatory. High above the remote Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the northernmost part of Australia, an air-launched rocket fired into space on Independence Day weekend to kick off a weekslong pursuit of a…
Chemicals from accidents that injured or killed people increased by nearly 50 percent in recent years. Physicist Ronald Koopman appeared at a Southern California Air District meeting in 2018 to talk about what seemed like an arcane scientific topic: hydrofluoric acid dispersion and water mitigation testing. Hydrofluoric acid, also…
The heat of the Hadean may have come from impacts as well as the interior. Earth is the only planet we know of with buoyant, silica-rich continents. But, despite decades of research, geologists still don’t agree on how they formed. “The continents started appearing around about four billion years…
