“I think the team has really experienced the loss of a loved one with the end of the mission.” NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft was in excellent shape when it disappeared behind Mars on December 6 of last year. The routine passage, called an occultation, was supposed to last less than…
Used Waymo batteries will bolster California and Texas energy storage projects. Thousands of electric vehicles in Waymo’s autonomous robotaxi fleet may eventually give up their used batteries for a very different purpose—contributing up to hundreds of megawatt-hours of stationary energy storage to local power grids. That prospect comes from…
Some quantum computing companies we’ve covered have done recent progress updates. With dozens of companies, from small startups to tech giants, pursuing quantum computing, there’s a steady flow of results as they try to find a path to utility. We typically focus on new technologies and major landmarks, which…
When they’re being eaten, bean plants release chemicals that draw in parasitic wasps. For decades, scientists have understood that plants can release volatile organic compounds—essentially airborne chemical signals—to attract the natural enemies of the things that eat them, like caterpillars. What we didn’t know was exactly how a plant…
“It’s a reminder of how human activity is changing the natural world in unanticipated ways.” Male bowerbirds are notorious for their complex mating rituals. They build intricate tunnels out of twigs—the bowers from which they get their name—and then decorate them with random colorful items gleaned from the environment.…
Neanderthals had some wild stuff in their toolkits. One way archaeologists learn how ancient people, including Neanderthals, did things is to attempt to do those things themselves, a process called experimental archaeology. Normally, that involves making stone tools, butchering deer, or distilling birch tar. But in a new study,…
The National Center for Atmospheric Research won’t be losing its supercomputer. In December, the Trump administration abruptly announced it would shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a Boulder, Colorado-based facility that helps researchers perform studies of weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry, and more. The news came as…
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…
