Kea parrot missing his upper beak “has rewritten what disability means for behaviorally complex species.” Bruce the kea—a species of alpine parrot native to New Zealand—lost his upper beak in an accident as a young bird. But that hasn’t stopped him from becoming the dominant male in his kea…
Blue Origin’s reused first stage hit its targets, but New Glenn’s upper stage did not. The third flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn launcher began Sunday with the company’s first successful reflight of an orbital-class booster, but ended with a setback for Jeff Bezos’ flagship rocket, a key…
The laser was used to study the physics of stellar interiors and fusion energy, among other things. If you walk across the open yard in front of the Physics, Math, and Astronomy building at the University of Texas at Austin, you’ll see a 17-story tower and a huge L-shaped…
The sharks might also be the most physiologically vulnerable to warming waters. The evolutionary edge that fueled great white shark dominance for millions of years could soon become its greatest downfall. The ocean’s most iconic predators maintain warmer body temperatures than the surrounding seawater and are paying an increasingly…
Blue Origin will soon launch the third flight of its New Glenn rocket, this time with a reused booster. Welcome to Edition 8.37 of the Rocket Report! NASA is still climbing down from the high of the Artemis II mission, the first flight by humans to the Moon since…
Europe’s first Mars rover mission is now on its fourth rocket: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy NASA confirmed Thursday that SpaceX will launch the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, perhaps as soon as late 2028, on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. So why is NASA…
GPT-Rosalind is an LLM trained on biology workflows, available in closed access. On Thursday, OpenAI announced it had developed a large language model specifically trained on common biology workflows. Called GPT-Rosalind after Rosalind Franklin, the model appears to differ from most science-focused models from major tech companies, which have…
Nine-year-old Kai’s podcast explores how quantum technologies can transform our daily lives. Scientists are often advised to explain their work in terms that a child can understand—a task that is particularly challenging when it comes to such complex topics as quantum mechanics. It’s easier when the interviewer is an…
Latest data must still be analyzed but could help determine if dark energy is constant or varies over time. Visualization shows how DESI built its 3D map of the Universe. Earth is at the center of the wedges, and every point is a galaxy. Credit: DESI/KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor In a…
For decades, scientists have concentrated on what now looks to be a blind alley. At the end of last month, a scientific journal pulled a research paper on Alzheimer’s disease. The retraction came from Neurobiology of Aging, which removed a 2011 paper claiming to show that a version of a…
