Global warming is awakening sleeping giants of ice at the South Pole. As recently as the 1990s, when the Greenland Ice Sheet and the rest of the Arctic region were measurably thawing under the climatic blowtorch of human-caused global warming, most of Antarctica’s vast ice cap still seemed securely…
Nikon Small World photomicrography contest is an annual reminder that science can be beautiful as well as informative. A stunning image of a rice weevil on a single grain of rice has won the 2025 Nikon Small World photomicrography contest, yielding valuable insight into the structure and behavior of—and…
“Winning” means prioritizing independence from outside influence over being right. Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong. Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests…
This was the last flight of SpaceX’s second-gen Starship design. Version 3 arrives next year. SpaceX closed a troubled but instructive chapter in its Starship rocket program Monday with a near-perfect test flight that carried the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world from South Texas to the Indian…
“The final phase of Starship’s trajectory on Flight 11 includes a dynamic banking maneuver.” SpaceX is set to launch the 11th full-scale test flight of the company’s Starship rocket Monday evening, with hopes of capping a tumultuous year with a successful one-hour voyage from South Texas to the Indian…
This Soyuz mission is brought to you by the Wagner Group. These are tough times for Russia’s civilian space program. In the last few years, Russia has cut back on the number of Soyuz crew missions it is sending to the International Space Station, and a replacement for the…
The termites know how much of their agricultural area has been taken over by weeds. Odontotermes obesus is one of the termite species that grows fungi, called Termitomyces, in their mounds. Workers collect dead leaves, wood, and grass to stack them in underground fungus gardens called combs. There, the…
The long, winding road for Franklin Chang-Diaz’s plasma rocket engine takes another turn. Welcome to Edition 8.14 of the Rocket Report! We’re now more than a week into a federal government shutdown, but there’s been little effect on the space industry. Military space operations are continuing unabated, and NASA…
AI is “comically good” at detecting small earthquakes—here’s why that matters. On January 1, 2008, at 1:59 am in Calipatria, California, an earthquake happened. You haven’t heard of this earthquake; even if you had been living in Calipatria, you wouldn’t have felt anything. It was magnitude -0.53, about the…
“You don’t have to claim that they’re aliens to make these exciting.” A few days ago, an inscrutable interstellar interloper made its closest approach to Mars, where a fleet of international spacecraft seek to unravel the red planet’s ancient mysteries. Several of the probes encircling Mars took a break…
