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…
Disturbances in this critical sense are often linked to problems with brain health. About 14 years ago, Chrissi Kelly lost her sense of smell. She had traveled to the Czech Republic to visit family and caught some virus. Months later, when she still couldn’t smell, she made the rounds…
Biology could explain the find, but there are other potential explanations. NASA’s Perseverance rover has spent five years traversing Jezero Crater looking for the chemical leftovers of whatever processes were at work on Mars billions of years ago. The rover has found organic carbon, but it has mostly been…
NASA awarded Rocket Lab deals for three dedicated launches using the company’s Electron rocket. Welcome to Edition 9.01 of the Rocket Report! Back in January, I wrote about the 20 launches and landings we were most excited about in 2026. The list included things that were, at the time,…
It only works for a few divisions thanks to a lot of added materials. Understanding the origin of life requires addressing a collection of overlapping scientific questions. We’ve made a lot of progress toward explaining how simple chemicals present on an early Earth built the complex molecules used by…
