Science

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. A 13-month streak of record-breaking global warmth has ended. From June 2023 until June 2024, air and ocean surface water temperatures averaged a quarter of a degree Celsius higher than records set only a few years previously. Air …

After Butch Wilmore got settled into the commander seat of Starliner earlier this summer, he thanked the people preparing to blast him and his crewmate Suni Williams into space. “Outstanding. Nice job, guys,” the NASA astronaut said before a launch attempt that ultimately scrubbed. “We’ll see you in a couple …

A car-sized NASA rover, weighing over a ton, will scale a crater wall. The space agency announced that its robotic Perseverance mission, now looking for hints of past life on Mars, is embarking on the next phase of Martian exploration. But first, it must climb out of the Jezero Crater, …

With no consensus on the safety of the Starliner crew capsule, NASA officials said Wednesday they need another week or two before deciding whether to bring two astronauts back to Earth on Boeing's spacecraft or extend their stay on the International Space Station until next year. Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, stricken …

It’s good to know that our planetary defense systems work. The European Space Agency revealed that on July 6 the automated systems that sleuth the skies for potentially hazardous objects like asteroids sent out a warning. “The object, estimated at around 50 m [164 feet] in diameter, was spotted hurtling …

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish. August has delivered many spectacular sights in the night sky: a supermoon, meteor showers, and supercharged auroras. Mars and Jupiter also currently appear unusually close together in the night sky, in what’s known as a conjunction. …

For a while, it looked like the psychedelic drug MDMA was poised to become an approved treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, after being rejected by the US Food and Drug Administration, MDMA faces an uphill battle to becoming legalized as medicine. In 2017, the FDA granted MDMA “breakthrough therapy” …

Mercury retrograde has long permeated our culture in an attempt to explain phenomena like communication issues or travel woes. Here is what is actually happening when Mercury is “in retrograde.”

Roeland Decorte grew up in a nursing home in Belgium, where he learned to spot the subtle early signs of mental decline in small changes to how residents walked or talked. When Decorte was 11, his father, who owned and managed the care home, started waking up in the middle …

A menacing asteroid, some six miles wide, triggered Earth’s last mass extinction. Now, scientists have found where it originated. Unlike most space rocks that impact our planet today, this behemoth object came from beyond the gas giant Jupiter. It was a “C-type asteroid” — which are the dark, carbon-rich leftovers …