In June 2012, University of Texas researcher Todd Humphreys took a dare from the Department of Homeland Security and used a homemade device to spoof a hovering drone out of the sky at White Sands Missile Range — showing that a fake GPS signal, built from off-the-shelf parts, could quietly steal control of civilian navigation.
In January 2025, a Swiss A220 aborted its landing at Vilnius at 850 feet after GPS spoofing fed its instruments false data. The aircraft was mechanically perfect — and had to divert to Warsaw.
In September 2017, twenty ships near Novorossiysk watched their GPS receivers calmly place them at an airport 25 miles inland. No warning lights, no dropped signals — just a coherent lie broadcast on the correct frequency. Spoofing is the attack that hides itself, and modern aviation is only beginning to grapple with what it means when the instrument no longer knows it is being deceived.
In June 2012, University of Texas professor Todd Humphreys and his students used a homemade GPS spoofer costing a few thousand dollars to secretly steer an $80 million superyacht off course in the Mediterranean — while every instrument on the bridge insisted the ship was on track.
A softball-sized satellite from a small Miami company has quietly rewritten the rules of who gets to fly nuclear power in space.
Time travel into the future sounds like a fiction problem until it is written in the language of clocks.
GJ 251 c is the kind of planet astronomers have been trying to find for decades: nearby, relatively small, in a temperate orbit, and separated from its star just enough that future telescopes may not have to infer its existence only from a wobble.
Albert Einstein is so closely identified with relativity that it can feel natural to assume the Nobel Prize followed that theory.
The International Space Station is often described as being "up" in space, but that word can quietly mislead.
In almost seven decades of deep-sea exploration, the direct human view of the deep ocean floor is still smaller than many people would guess.
The best global maps of Mars, the Moon and Venus resolve finer detail than the best global map of our own seabed. A look at why, and how fast the gap is closing.
On February 18, 1930, Clyde Tombaugh found a moving point of light on two photographic plates taken at Lowell Observatory in Arizona.
A neutron star is one of the few objects in astronomy where the familiar scale of a city and the unfamiliar scale of nuclear physics meet in the same sentence.
Voyager 1 is already in interstellar space. NASA states that the spacecraft crossed into that region in August 2012, after passing beyond the heliopause: the…
Proxima Centauri b has a claim no other known exoplanet can match. It orbits the nearest star to the Sun, just over four light-years away, and it sits in the kind of orbit where liquid water could exist on a rocky surface.
NASA's Curiosity rover has added a more detailed layer to one of the hardest questions in Mars science: not whether ancient Mars was ever habitable, but how much chemical evidence can survive long enough for a rover to find it.
