A 5,500-year-old fossil from Colombia has scientists rethinking syphilis origins. When King Charles VIII of France occupied Naples in 1495, his army of nearly 20,000 mercenaries became the ground zero of the “Great Pox,” the first massive venereal syphilis pandemic in Europe, which went on to cause up to…
Imagine: You lost your car’s cargo rack, but didn’t notice until you reached your destination. If you’re in the space business long enough, you learn there are numerous ways a rocket can fail. I’ve written my share of stories about misbehaving rockets and the extensive investigations that usually—but not…
“International partners, I have not been allowed to talk to yet because of the trade wars.” Gen. Michael Guetlein, the senior officer in charge of the US military’s planned Golden Dome missile defense shield, has laid out an audacious schedule for deploying a network of space-based sensors and interceptors…
These chemical oddities may explain why Earth seems to be deficient in certain elements. For close to a century, geoscientists have pondered a mystery: Where did Earth’s lighter elements go? Compared to amounts in the Sun and in some meteorites, Earth has less hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, as…
Kirk Milhoan’s comments come as federal vaccine policy slides to insignificance. The chair of a federal vaccine advisory panel under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made his stance clear on vaccines in a podcast last week—and that stance was so alarming that the American Medical Association was…
“These are just the difficulties of designing a spacesuit for the lunar environment.” Crew members traveling to the lunar surface on NASA’s Artemis missions should be gearing up for a grind. They will wear heavier spacesuits than those worn by the Apollo astronauts, and NASA will ask them to…
Rice University chemists replicated Thomas Edison’s seminal experiment and found a surprising byproduct. Graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super…
Another partially reusable Chinese rocket, the Long March 12B, is nearing its first test flight. Welcome to Edition 8.26 of the Rocket Report! The past week has been one of advancements and setbacks in the rocket business. NASA rolled the massive rocket for the Artemis II mission to its…
Their presence appears to lower the risk of food-borne illnesses from pathogens. Every spring, raptors return to nesting sites across northern Michigan. The smallest of these birds of prey, a falcon called the American kestrel (Falco sparverius), flies through the region’s many cherry orchards and spends its days hunting…
The world’s oldest art has an unintentional story to tell about human exploration. The world’s oldest surviving rock art is a faded outline of a hand on an Indonesian cave wall, left 67,800 years ago. On a tiny island just off the coast of Sulawesi (a much larger island…
