We’ll see how long the Department of War lasts. Space Force Combat Forces Command might stick around. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday authorizing the Department of Defense to refer to itself as the Department of War, reverting to a more bellicose title used until a 1940s-era…
One scientist says it’s like buying a car and running it into a tree to save on gas money. It was in 2002, during the George W. Bush administration, when NASA decided to put a satellite into orbit to track emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas pumped…
Judge rules Trump admin broke law, and says Supreme Court has been “unhelpful.” A federal judge sided with Harvard University in its lawsuit against the Trump administration, ordering the US government to unfreeze about $2.6 billion in funding. The judge’s ruling also criticized the Supreme Court for issuing orders…
There are no Falcon Heavy launches this year, so now’s the time for SpaceX to act. Remember the first time you saw a SpaceX rocket nail a bullseye landing after hurtling back from space? How about the first time two boosters landed side by side, punctuating the inaugural launch…
Study shows how patterns in LLM training data can lead to “parahuman” responses. If you were trying to learn how to get other people to do what you want, you might use some of the techniques found in a book like Influence: The Power of Persuasion. Now, a pre-print…
Department of Energy is not serious about engaging with the scientific community. More than 85 climate scientists declared the Department of Energy’s new climate report unfit for policymaking in a comprehensive review released Tuesday. The DOE’s report cherry-picked evidence, lacked peer-reviewed studies to support its questioning of the detrimental…
The Pentagon says the move will save money, but acknowledges risk to military readiness. President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that US Space Command will be relocated from Colorado to Alabama, returning to the Pentagon’s plans for the command’s headquarters from the final days of Trump’s first term in the…
A structure like those found on water striders’ legs keeps a robot out of the water. Robots can serve pizza, crawl over alien planets, swim like octopuses and jellyfish, cosplay as humans, and even perform surgery. But can they walk on water? Rhagobot isn’t exactly the first thing that…
A 3D reconstruction of the Shroud of Turin, “jelly ice,” regenerating snail eyes, and more It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we…
One of the world’s foremost climate models now faces funding threats. In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz was running weather simulations on an early computer system when he realized that a small rounding difference led to extremely divergent weather predictions. He later called this idea the butterfly effect to…
