Ig Nobel-winning research could one day be used to treat people with blocked airways or clogged lungs. Last year, a group of researchers won the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus. But as with many Ig Nobel…
European wolves flee human conversation faster than dogs’ barking. In May 2025, the European Parliament changed the status of wolves in the EU from “strictly protected” to “protected,” which opened the way for its member states to allow hunting under certain conditions, such as protecting livestock. One of the…
New method extracts desirable elements from waste magnets using less energy and acid. All the world’s discarded phones, bricked laptops, and other trashed electronics are collectively a treasure trove of rare earth elements (REEs). But separating out and recovering these increasingly sought-after materials is no easy task. However, a…
Guppies are highly susceptible to the Ebbinghaus illusion. Ring doves? Not so much. Chances are you’ve encountered some version of the “Ebbinghaus illusion,” in which a central circle appears to be smaller when encircled by larger circles and seems larger when surrounded by smaller circles. It’s an example of…
Ars chats with co-authors Lindsey Fitzharris and Adrian Teal about their delightful new children’s book. In 1890, a German scientist named Robert Koch thought he’d invented a cure for tuberculosis, a substance derived from the infecting bacterium itself that he dubbed Tuberculin. His substance didn’t actually cure anyone, but…
Preparations for the Artemis II mission continue despite the federal government shutdown. The Orion spacecraft, which will fly four people around the Moon, arrived inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida late Thursday night, ready to be stacked on top of its rocket…
A recent study found lead in teeth from 2 million-year-old hominin fossils. Our hominid ancestors faced a Pleistocene world full of dangers—and apparently one of those dangers was lead poisoning. Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define “modern” the way a paleoanthropologist might: a…
There’s no big rush to bring SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to Vandenberg Space Force Base. The Department of the Air Force has approved SpaceX’s plans to launch up to 100 missions per year from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This would continue the tectonic turnaround at the spaceport on…
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…
