Science and Technolgy blog
Electric motors are, in so many ways, much better than internal combustion engines. They don’t waste most of the energy you put into them as heat and sound, they’re easy to control, and they make huge amounts of torque almost…
A second person has reportedly died of a measles infection, this time in New Mexico, as the virus continues to spread in the United States.
Changes in gender ideology are often observed as couples transition into parenthood, according to recent research published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. The study suggests that women are inclined to embrace more traditional roles following childbirth, a pattern…
Although the Trump administration will not publicly release its budget request for at least a few more weeks, senior agency officials are starting to be briefed on the president’s priorities. This includes NASA. As expected, the president’s plan for the…
A 1-degree-Celsius change in water temperature prompts sea turtles in Northern Cyprus to lay eggs nearly a week earlier on average.
SpaceX’s Starship launcher spun out of control minutes after liftoff Thursday, showering fiery debris over the Bahamas and dealing another setback to Elon Musk’s rocket program after a failure under similar circumstances less than two months ago. Starship and its…
Scientists have built the first networked quantum computer using photons, demonstrating that room-temperature modules can be connected and scaled up.
Mount Roraima is a flat-topped formation with crystal-clear pools, waterfalls and a unique ecosystem that has been isolated from the surrounding savanna for millions of years.
Deep neural networks can quantify facial characteristics more accurately than previous methods, improving predictions of in-person attraction, according to a study published in Evolution & Human Behavior. Facial attractiveness significantly influences human mate selection, yet current methods for measuring key…
Welcome to Edition 7.34 of the Rocket Report! What a day in space Thursday was. During the morning hours we saw the triumphant second flight of the Ariane 6 rocket, a pivotal moment for European sovereignty in space. Then Intuitive…
Our brain’s memory center has a sleek design, new data show. The finding comes from looking at living human hippocampus tissue. This part of the brain plays a key role in learning and memory. The analyzed tissue revealed fairly few…
Does using cannabis earlier in life lead to faster cognitive decline as you get older? A recent study published in the journal Brain and Behavior that tracked the thinking abilities of thousands of men from young adulthood into middle age…
For a long time, the cheapest iPhones were basically just iPhones that were older than the current flagship, but last week’s release of the $600 iPhone 16e marks a big change in how Apple is approaching its lineup. Rather than…
The skeleton of a Stone Age child discovered in Thailand is rewriting what experts know about the prehistory of the area.
Ayahuasca, a traditional Amazonian brew known for its psychedelic effects, appears to enhance certain aspects of memory, according to a recent study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. When experienced users took the brew before viewing a series of scenes, their…
Sea ice cover dropped to a record low across February 2025 as global warming continues to breach the 1.5 C Paris Agreement target, according to data from the Copernicus satellite.
Inside a small control room, during the middle of the day on Thursday local time in Texas, about a dozen white-knuckled engineers at a space startup named Intuitive Machines started to get worried. Their spacecraft, a lander named Athena, was…
Babies are like little detectives, constantly piecing together clues about the world around them. If you’ve ever noticed your baby staring at you while you talk, it’s because they’re picking up on more than just sounds – they’re learning how…
A pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently discovered hints that the process of compressing information can solve complex reasoning tasks without pre-training on a large number of examples. Their system tackles some types of abstract pattern-matching tasks using only…
Here at Ars, we’ve written frequently about the video game industry’s ongoing problem with blatant game cloning, and the shifting legal and ethical landscape around the issue. But we’ve rarely seen a case of alleged game theft as blatant as…
An ambitious new survey by the Hubble Space Telescope offers the first bird’s-eye view of all known dwarf galaxies orbiting the Andromeda galaxy. The data suggests Andromeda had a chaotic past unlike anything scientists expected.
Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket lifted off Thursday from French Guiana and deployed a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the French military, notching a success on its first operational flight. The 184-foot-tall (56-meter) rocket lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana,…
Most Android phones ship with Google’s Gboard as the default input option. It’s a reliable, feature-rich on-screen keyboard, so most folks just keep using it instead of installing a third-party option. Depending on how you feel about circles, it might…
In an early clinical trial, an experimental norovirus vaccine given as a pill produced defensive responses exactly where it counts—in the saliva of older people most vulnerable to the explosive stomach bug. The results, published this week in Science Translational…
The Trump administration is eliminating a preference for fiber Internet in a $42.45 billion broadband deployment program, a change that is expected to reduce spending on the most advanced wired networks while directing more money to Elon Musk’s Starlink and…
Expect an uptick in aurora sightings near the spring equinox on March 20, as celestial geometry swings in favor of geomagnetic disturbances.
1Password has announced a new feature that lets you assign a geolocation to items stored in your vault. At first glance, that might not seem like much: a new little box inside a mobile utility you use on occasion. But…
Creating new and exciting tech products requires thinking outside of the box. At this week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) conference in Barcelona, we got a peek at some of the research and development happening in the hopes of forging a…
Cloud forests are biodiversity hot spots and crucial water sources. But climate change and deforestation are shrinking their range, new data show.
Understanding the genetics of Labrador retriever obesity may help dog owners mitigate their best friend’s weight gain.
Firefly Aerospace landed a craft safely last week, a first for a private company. The status of Intuitive Machines’ lander is unknown.
On Wednesday, the Senate voted to block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from monitoring digital payments companies for fraud and privacy concerns—which Democratic lawmakers Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff said gave Elon Musk a “get out of jail free card.”…
Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania boasts sediment layers dating back to about 1.8 million years ago. Those layers contain simple stone tools that marked one of the earliest recorded technological transitions. Now, researchers have uncovered a substantial cache of prehistoric…
It could be one of the best under-desk treadmills on a tight budget.
Different versions of a gene called ACE2 affect how well the placenta grows during pregnancy, a laboratory study finds.
A recent study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders suggests that having children may offer some protection against bipolar disorder and major depression in women. Researchers analyzed data from a large sample of women in the United Kingdom and…
Cow D lived on a dairy farm in New Zealand. The animal looked like the typical black-and-white cow farmers raise for milk, except for one thing: Researchers had outfitted Cow D with an artificial fistula—a hole offering them a way…
There’s a reason that the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, were home to many autonomous vehicle programs: Driving on wide streets in great weather is easy mode for an AV. But a commercial robotaxi service that only works when the sun…
NASA’s Juno spacecraft identifies over 40 enormous lava lakes on Io, shedding light on the extreme volcanism sculpting Jupiter’s moon.
A study published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General found that when people are unaware of a visual cue, their brain processes it separately from their expectations, but when they become aware of it, these two processes start to interact.…
A newly discovered network botnet comprising an estimated 30,000 webcams and video recorders—with the largest concentration in the US—has been delivering what is likely to be the biggest denial-of-service attack ever seen, a security researcher inside Nokia said. The botnet, tracked…
The discovery of a golden scaleless fish in China is helping scientists understand how animals evolved to live in caves.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggests that the “memory” of ancient events, such as black hole mergers, may be etched into the fabric of space-time by gravitational waves. New research shows how this theory of gravitational memory could finally be…
A recent study published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress has shed light on why some veterans develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after combat deployments while others do not. The research found that certain personality traits, specifically those related to…
Does math leave you anxious? Maybe you feel it’s unforgiving — that unless everything is perfectly right, it’s totally wrong. Perhaps it just doesn’t compute for you. It’s like looking at a foreign language — one in which you’re far…
Patients with PFIC develop liver failure as a result of a buildup of a digestive fluid known as bile.
Why do some memories, especially those tied to strong emotions, feel so much more vivid and persistent? A recent study published in The Journal of Neuroscience provides answers, revealing that repeated exposure to emotional events leads to the formation of…
For many people, coding is about telling a computer what to do and having the computer perform those precise actions repeatedly. With the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, it’s now possible for someone to describe a program in English…
In a clinical trial, treating both partners in a relationship significantly reduced the likelihood of recurrence of bacterial vaginosis.
The Apollo 17 mission landed on the Moon on December 11, in 1972. From that point on, literally for decades, NASA and the United States did not go back to the surface of our nearest planetary body. It was not…
