With the government shutdown over, the FAA has lifted its daytime launch curfew. Welcome to Edition 8.20 of the Rocket Report! For the second week in a row, Blue Origin dominated the headlines with news about its New Glenn rocket. After a stunning success November 13 with the launch…
Eclipse tables in the Dresden Codex were based on lunar tables and adjusted for slippage over time. Astronomical events such as eclipses were central to Maya culture, reflected in the care the Maya took to keep accurate calendars to aid in celestial predictions. Among the few surviving Maya texts…
The splatter master was more clumsy than graceful in his movements, which are key to his distinctive style. Not everyone appreciates the artistry of Jackson Pollock’s famous drip paintings, with some dismissing them as something any child could create. While Pollock’s work is undeniably more sophisticated than that, it…
A rundown of what we know of the third extrasolar object we’ve identified. Since early July, telescopes around the world have been tracking just our third confirmed interstellar visitor, the comet 3I/ATLAS—3I, for third interstellar, and ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) for the telescope network that first spotted…
AlphaProof can handle math challenges but needs a bit of help right now. Computers are extremely good with numbers, but they haven’t gotten many human mathematicians fired. Until recently, they could barely hold their own in high school-level math competitions. But now Google’s DeepMind team has built AlphaProof, an…
For humans and AI, when something fits the category of “ordinary,” it slips from notice. On a sunny morning on October 19 2025, four men allegedly walked into the world’s most-visited museum and left, minutes later, with crown jewels worth 88 million euros ($101 million). The theft from Paris’…
Government can’t use funding threats to override the First Amendment. On Friday, a US District Court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the United States government from halting federal funding at UCLA or any other school in the University of California system. The ruling came in response to a suit…
Study identified several trace chemical signatures of opium in ancient Egyptian alabaster vase. Scientists have found traces of ancient opiates in the residue lining an Egyptian alabaster vase, indicating that opiate use was woven into the fabric of the culture. And the Egyptians didn’t just indulge occasionally: according to…
Chimps can take in new evidence, evaluate its strength, and change their minds. When Aristotle claimed that humans differ from other animals because they have the ability to be rational, he understood rational to mean that we could form our views and beliefs based on evidence, and that we…
Exquisitely preserved fossils come from a single site in Wyoming. Edmontosaurus annectens, a large herbivore duck-billed dinosaur that lived toward the end of the Cretaceous period, was discovered back in 1908 in east-central Wyoming by C.H. Sternberg, a fossil collector. The skeleton, later housed at the American Museum of…
