Scientists want to send a roly-poly robot filled with ‘dandelion drones’ to investigate hidden tunnels on Mars
Engineers are increasingly turning to the concept of “biomimicry” for the next generation of Mars robots.
The solar system’s largest moon may be heating up — offering clues to its mysterious origins
The largest moon in the solar system — Jupiter’s Ganymede — has a unique and inexplicable magnetic field. New research could finally explain it: the moon is heating up.
Consciousness might not be something the brain creates — it might be a fundamental feature of reality itself, more like gravity than like a thought — and one of the most credentialed neuroscientists alive is now arguing that mainstream science has been wrong about it for a century
The mainstream scientific framing of consciousness has been, for most of the last century, calibrated to a particular structural assumption. The assumption is that consciousness is something the brain produces, that the production occurs through the various electrochemical activities of neurons and their networks, and that the underlying problem of explaining how subjective experience arises […]
A Probe Took Incredible Pictures of Mars on Its Way to a Far-Off Asteroid
NASA took advantage of the recent close approach of the Psyche probe to Mars to calibrate its observation instruments.
NASA is building a nuclear reactor for the Moon by 2030 — and testing the nuclear propulsion that could carry humans to Mars in the decade after — under a new directive that revives a space-nuclear ambition the agency has been quietly chasing since Apollo
NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy announced, on January 13, 2026, that they had signed a memorandum of understanding committing the two agencies to the development of a nuclear fission reactor on the lunar surface by 2030. The signing was the formalization of a sequence of events that began in August 2025, when then-acting […]
The Sky Today on Monday, May 25: Three planets after sunset
A trio of planets stand in line in the evening sky after sunset: Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury, all visible in the twilit sky.
See A Rare ‘Blue Moon’ Rise After Sunset This Week
North America’s celestial highlights for the week ahead, which also apply to mid-northern latitudes in the northern hemisphere.
In 1908 something exploded over a remote part of Siberia with the force of roughly 1,000 Hiroshima bombs, flattened 80 million trees, and was heard 600 miles away — and more than a century later, scientists still cannot fully agree on whether it was an asteroid, a comet, or something else entirely
On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky over a remote stretch of Siberian forest split open. Eyewitnesses — and there were only a handful, because almost nobody lived there — described a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the sun, moving across the sky. Then a flash. Then a sound like […]
Every GPS satellite is launched with a clock deliberately set to run slow, because Einstein’s relativity speeds it up by about 38 microseconds a day once in orbit — and without that built-in correction, your phone’s location would drift by roughly ten kilometres a day.
Every satellite in the GPS constellation carries atomic clocks, and before launch those clocks are deliberately set to tick at the wrong rate. They are adjusted to run slightly slow. The offset is small and precise, and it is built in on the ground, on purpose, by the engineers who designed the system. The reason […]
100,000-year-old Homo sapiens bones from Ethiopia may preserve earliest evidence of human cremation
Researchers in Ethiopia found 100,000-year-old Homo sapiens remains with possible evidence of the earliest human cremation.