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…
It’s a closely watched test of whether corporate alliances on climate efforts violate antitrust laws. This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. Since 2022, Republican lawmakers in Congress and state…
Firefly Aerospace reveals why its Alpha booster exploded after launch in April. Welcome to Edition 8.08 of the Rocket Report! What a week it’s been for SpaceX. The company completed its first successful Starship test flight in nearly a year, and while it wasn’t perfect, it sets up SpaceX…
The species’s boundaries in North America seem to have been fairly fluid. We tend to lump all mammoths together as big, hairy elephant-like beasts with enormous tusks. But there were a number of mammoth species, including less furry ones that inhabited temperate regions. And the furry ones include at…
“Once a species enters, they never leave,” interior secretary says. But there’s more to the story. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” It’s the ominous slogan for “Hotel California,” an iconic fictional lodging dreamed up by the Eagles in 1976. One of…
A species known only by a single rib turns out to be covered with meter-long spikes. Ankylosaurs, with their squat, armored bodies and bizarre, weaponized tails, are an iconic group of dinosaurs. While there were plenty of species present in the Cretaceous, they’re thought to have origins that trace…
This was the first successful flight of SpaceX’s second-generation Starship after three failures. STARBASE, Texas—SpaceX launched the 10th test flight of the company’s Starship rocket Tuesday evening, sending the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world to an on-target splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The largely successful mission for…
Collapsing gas clouds in the early universe may have formed lower-mass stars as well. For decades, astronomers have wondered what the very first stars in the universe were like. These stars formed new chemical elements, which enriched the universe and allowed the next generations of stars to form the…
It’s not just you. Survey says: “Twitter sucks now and all the cool kids are moving to Bluesky” Marine biologist and conservationist David Shiffman was an early power user and evangelist for science engagement on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Over the years, he trained more…
