Can bioengineered bacteria help terraform Mars?
Last month Erika DeBenedictis, CEO of the nonprofit start-up Pioneer Labs, delighted or shocked many space nerds with some big news: she and her colleagues
See the cool photos this Jupiter-bound spacecraft took while swinging by Earth
Early Monday morning, the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) zoomed by Earth as it prepared to slingshot itself off to the outer
How a horse flu crisis fueled animals rights advocacy in the U.S.
On Wednesday, October 23, 1872, a slew of articles appeared in The New York Times, The New York Herald, and The New York Sun, warning
Watch a robot dog run a marathon faster than the average human
Hot on the heels of humanoid robots besting Usain Bolt’s record in the 100-meter sprint is a marathon-running dog bot. The quadrupedal machine, named RAIBO2,
Why human language may be intertwined with fire
When asked about the greatest innovation of humans, people will often say language or fire. A new paper suggests that these innovations may be more
Missing pages of priceless Henry VIII–era manuscript finally found
A 600-year-old book that once belonged to a personal attendant of King Henry VIII is helping to reveal the shifting allegiances and religious ferment that
25 winners of math’s ‘Nobel Prize’ decry the AI invasion of their discipline
Top mathematicians are increasingly pushing back against the tech industry’s artificial-intelligence-powered incursion into their field. A statement released last Friday and signed by 25 winners
How the Math That Powers Google Foresaw the New Pope
October 11, 2025 5 min read The Math That Predicted the New Pope A decades-old technique from network science saw something in the papal conclave
Birds Went Silent during the Great North American Eclipse—Here’s What Researchers Discovered
When a total solar eclipse plunged North America into darkness on the afternoon of April 8, 2024, the songbirds in Bloomington, Ind., suddenly fell silent.
Mathematicians Discover Prime Number Pattern in Fractal Chaos
Prime numbers are sometimes called math’s “atoms” because they can be divided by only themselves and 1. For two millennia, mathematicians have wondered if the