Rachel Hartigan on her new book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life. Famed aviator Amelia Earhart mysteriously disappeared in 1937 during an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Speculative theories abound about what really happened to Earhart, but while tantalizing…
Research proceeds on alternatives, but some doubt whether true lie detection is possible. When George W. Maschke applied to work for the FBI in 1994, he had already held a security clearance for over 11 years. The government had deemed him trustworthy through his career in the Army. But…
Breathing capacity could have compensated for lower atmospheric oxygen. Three-hundred million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic era were buzzing with giant insects. Meganeuropsis permiana, a predatory insect resembling a modern-day dragonfly, had a wingspan of over 70 centimeters and weighed 100 grams. Biologists looked at these…
A quantum experiment shows that we can formally test if the order of events matters. Over a decade ago, when I was first starting to pretend I could write about quantum mechanics, I covered a truly bizarre experiment. One half of a pair of entangled photons was sent through…
Specially equipped nets can help save some species, while allowing fisherman to still catch others. Our oceans are full of sophisticated, perfect traps: Nets, hooks, fishing lines. Designed to capture animals destined for our dinner tables, they often catch other wildlife too. This accidental harvest is known as bycatch,…
The US Space Force might move additional payloads off of ULA’s grounded Vulcan rocket. Welcome to Edition 8.35 of the Rocket Report! The headlines this week are again dominated by the big changes afoot in NASA’s exploration program, with the announcement of a Moon base and a nuclear-powered rocket…
Subjects who interacted with AI tools were more likely to think they were right, less likely to resolve conflicts. We all need a little validation now and then from friends or family, but sometimes too much validation can backfire—and the same is true of AI chatbots. There have been…
This will not be turning up in the church rummage sale. Recent repairs to a centuries-old tile floor at a church in the Netherlands may have revealed the skeleton of the French Musketeer d’Artagnan. Today, Charles de Batz de Castlemore, Count d’Artagnan, is best known as a character in…
For much of the Western US, winter 2026 was the year snow never came. Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply…
Only one US-built nuclear reactor has ever flown in space, and that was more than 60 years ago. NASA’s announcement Tuesday that it will “pause” work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention…
