Science

Robotic Martians can see blue Earth in Mars‘ sky. The Curiosity rover, a car-sized NASA robot looking to find evidence of past habitability on the Red Planet, recently snapped an image of Mars’ misshapen moon, Phobos, and Earth next to each other. “It’s the first time an image of the …

The US Coast Guard’s Titan submersible hearing kicked off with a startling revelation. “I told him I’m not getting in it,” former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen said to a panel of Coast Guard investigators, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to act …

A white spacecraft, lightly toasted like a marshmallow and smelling of singed metal, fell out of the night sky early on Sunday morning and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico not all that far from Key West. The darkened waters there were carefully chosen from among dozens of potential …

Mark, a 64-year-old with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, uses Amazon Alexa all the time using his voice. But now, thanks to a brain implant, he can also control the virtual assistant with his mind. ALS affects the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, causing loss of muscle …

By the time Louise Tilley got to the blood sample, it had already been puzzling scientists for more than 30 years. In 1972, a pregnant woman had her blood taken, and doctors noticed that her red blood cells seemed to lack a surface marker, known as an antigen, that everyone …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. To understand the universe, scientists look to its outliers. “You always want to know about the extreme cases—the special cases that lie at the edge,” said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the University of Southampton. Black holes are the …

The far outskirts of our galaxy are teeming with activity. Astronomers pointed the powerful James Webb Space Telescope at a distant zone dubbed the “Extreme Outer Galaxy,” and zoomed in on dense cosmic clouds containing clusters of stars. In unprecedented resolution of this region, they spotted vibrant star formation, and …

This story originally appeared in Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2023, the fast-fashion giant Shein was everywhere. Crisscrossing the globe, airplanes ferried small packages of its ultra-cheap clothing from thousands of suppliers to tens of millions of customer mailboxes in 150 countries. Influencers’ “#sheinhaul” videos …

In 2020, while the Covid-19 pandemic raged, a steadily growing epidemic continued to burn its path across the United States. Gun violence stole the lives of 45,222 Americans that fateful year, the worst year on record for gun deaths to that point. The path leading to each one of these …

Crew onboard the Russian Soyuz capsule, a flight to the International Space Station (ISS) that took place on Sept. 11, became record-breaking space residents this week, as humanity waves up to the now 19 humans living and working in space. It’s the largest group living in space concurrently in history. …