Universe
Titan's methane rain falls like water on Earth, but on ice as hard as stone
Titan’s methane weather produces an Earth-like cycle of clouds, rain, rivers and seas over a crust where water ice behaves as stone.
Space & Missions
Meteorite from Algeria fills a 1.8-billion-year gap in Mars's geological record
The Algerian meteorite fills a 1.8-billion-year void in Mars's geological record, offering the first window into a mysterious period when the Red Planet may have undergone dramatic internal changes.
Science & Engineering
AI won't command spacecraft, but it will make the crucial calls Earth can't reach in time
The real space job for AI isn't commanding starships—it's making split-second decisions when radio delays make human oversight impossible.
Space & Missions
Perseverance rover completes Mars marathon in record time with AI navigation
Machines that navigate by themselves are finally allowing Mars rovers to outrun the planet's punishing delays—and to go places human operators never could.
Space & Missions
A laser sail could reach our nearest star in decades, not millennia
Our nearest stellar neighbor could harbor life, yet remains unreachable with today's technology—forcing us to choose between patience and innovation.
Science & Engineering
Spacecraft graveyard in the Pacific is far messier than its name implies
The final resting place of dead spacecraft is far messier—and more carefully orchestrated—than the name "graveyard" suggests.
Science & Engineering
NASA's AI hunts for hidden discoveries in 150 petabytes of archived data
Humanity may have already discovered the cure for cancer or the blueprint for fusion energy—buried somewhere in NASA's vast digital archives, waiting for artificial intelligence to find it.
Science & Engineering
Denmark's wind boom masks a growing grid vulnerability during calm weather
As Denmark's wind farms generate record shares of electricity, the grid's real test lies not in peak output but in surviving the frequent hours when turbines fall still.
Science & Engineering
At Jupiter's average distance, the Sun-Jupiter barycentre sits roughly 46,000…
The Sun wobbles too—a 46,000-kilometre waltz driven by the gravity of its largest planet.
Science & Engineering
Australian researchers fitted five magpies with GPS trackers to map their…
When researchers tried to track Australian magpies, the birds turned the tables—systematically removing each other's harnesses and revealing something far more interesting than GPS coordinates.
Universe
Fifty kilometres above Venus, pressure and temperature become surprisingly…
The planet's hellish surface is uninhabitable, but fifty kilometres up, in its clouds of sulphuric acid, conditions suddenly resemble Earth—a paradox that could transform how we think about colonizing other worlds.
Universe
The asteroid that ended the dinosaur age struck Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula about 66…
A cosmic lottery determined which rocks the asteroid would vaporize, turning a planetary impact into an extinction event.
Science & Engineering
At 224 kilometres above Earth, ESA's GOCE could have as little as two days to…
The thinner the air, the sharper the view—but also the narrower the margin for error when gravity won't let go.
Universe
A real group of scientists and engineers spent two days in Boulder this June asking…
The greatest obstacle to reaching Saturn's moon isn't overcoming the laws of physics—it's summoning the decades of sustained will and innovation that any human mission would demand.
Science & Engineering
In June 1961, a UCLA graduate student's summer job at JPL was to solve a narrower…
A forgotten insight from a summer intern became the key to exploring the outer solar system with a fraction of the fuel spacecraft designers thought necessary.
Space & Missions
NASA's first Space Shuttle launch lost 16 heat shield tiles and damaged 148 more…
The Space Shuttle's greatest threat didn't come from the vacuum of space—it came from the ground beneath it.