Officials expect the investigation into a booster anomaly on ULA’s Vulcan rocket to last multiple months. DENVER—The Global Positioning System is one of the few space programs that touches nearly every human life, and the stewards of the satellite navigation network are eager to populate the fleet with the…
Spare a thought for the intrepid graduate students who spent last summer in Africa collecting chimp urine. The urine of chimpanzees contains high levels of alcohol byproduct, most likely because the chimps regularly gorge themselves on fermented fruit, according to a new paper published in the journal Biology Letters.…
Coal makes a bit of a comeback, if only by accident. On Tuesday, the US Energy Information Administration released full-year data on how the country generated electricity in 2025. It’s a bit of a good news/bad news situation. The bad news is that overall demand rose appreciably, and a…
Micro-cracks travel along the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, producing shock waves and sound pulses. Scotch tape has been a household mainstay for nearly a century, but it still holds some scientific surprises. Researchers have discovered that the screeching sound emitted when one rapidly peels Scotch tape—akin to the…
“The point is to get missions out the door as fast as possible. Two to three years is too slow.” DALLAS—The Space Force officer tasked with overseeing more than $24 billion in research and development spending says the Pentagon is more interested in supporting startups building new space sensors…
“Accessing and remediating any of these issues can only be performed in the VAB.” A day after NASA officials expressed optimism that they could be ready to launch the Artemis II mission around the Moon next month, the space agency’s administrator announced Saturday that a new problem will require…
Like rocks, egg shells can trap isotopes, allowing us to use them to date samples. When dinosaur fossils surface at a site, it is often not possible to tell how many millions of years ago their bones were buried. While the different strata of sedimentary rock represent periods of…
A new book argues that tests might reshape human diversity even if they don’t work. Daphne O. Martschenko and Sam Trejo both want to make the world a better, fairer, more equitable place. But they disagree on whether studying social genomics—elucidating any potential genetic contributions to behaviors ranging from…
“Noncitizens” lost after-hours access to a NIST lab last month. One of the US government’s top scientific research labs is taking steps that could drive away foreign scientists, a shift lawmakers and sources tell WIRED could cost the country valuable expertise and damage the agency’s credibility. The National Institute…
The revised age may help make sense of 2-million-year-old stone tools elsewhere in China. Two skulls from Yunxian, in northern China, aren’t ancestors of Denisovans after all; they’re actually the oldest known Homo erectus fossils in eastern Asia. A recent study has re-dated the skulls to about 1.77 million…
