“I’m actually getting chills right now just thinking about it. My palms are sweating.” On the home stretch of their nine-day mission, the four astronauts flying aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft are just beginning to reflect on their experience of flying beyond the Moon. Their memories of Monday’s encounter with…
A World War II-era policy is stopping old coal plants from closing. At one time, the US electricity grid ran mostly on coal. But coal-fired power plants have steadily been decommissioned. Power producers found the plants were too expensive to operate and carried risks tied to toxic air pollution,…
“I think the biggest value here is the PR. I mean, it’s getting the public excited.” The data pipeline from NASA’s Artemis II mission opened to full blast a few hours after looping behind the far side of the Moon on Monday night, when the Orion spacecraft established a…
“Humans have probably not evolved to see what we’re seeing. It is truly hard to describe. It is amazing.” After staring at the Moon for almost eight hours Monday, the commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission finally ran out of ways to describe what he was seeing. “No matter…
Congress rejected huge cuts to science in 2026, but Trump is trying again. On Friday, the Trump administration released its proposed budget for 2027. The budget blueprint includes significant cuts to NASA, but it targets even more severe limits for other science-focused agencies, with no agencies spared. The document…
Congress will likely reject the White House’s NASA cuts, just as it did last year. President Donald Trump released a budget blueprint on Friday calling for a 23 percent cut to NASA’s budget, two days after the agency launched four astronauts on the first crewed lunar mission in more…
Ice Age hunter-gatherer “were intentionally relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways.” Native Americans have been playing with dice in games of chance for more than 12,000 years, according to a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity. And the oldest examples of Native American dice predate…
Experiments show large majorities uncritically accepting “faulty” AI answers. When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect…
A receptor that’s used to find prey is also activated by progesterone. Octopuses are one of the most alien creatures on Earth. The lack of bones makes them amazing shapeshifters, most of them can change color like chameleons, and they pump blue copper-based blood through their bodies using three…
Collection of fossils includes Ediacaran, Cambrian species, suggesting a transition. The details of how animal life began are a bit murky. Most of the groups familiar today are present in the Cambrian, a period when they rapidly diversified, with familiar features evolving alongside bizarre creatures with no obvious modern…
