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Four NASA astronauts are in their final preparations for the Artemis II moon launch, scheduled for this week. The mission will mark the first time humans have travelled to the vicinity of the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, more than half a century ago.
Mexico's monarch butterfly population surged 64 per cent this winter in a significant boost for one of the world's most iconic endangered migratory species, offering a rare piece of positive environmental news.
Winter sea ice in the Arctic has tied a record low, underscoring the accelerating pace of warming in a region that is heating several times faster than the global average. The ice plays a vital role in reflecting planet-warming sunlight back into space, meaning its decline creates a feedback loop that accelerates further warming.
NASA has outlined a three-phase plan to shift the Artemis programme from flag-planting lunar visits toward building permanent infrastructure on the Moon, framing the effort as a necessary proving ground for eventual crewed missions to Mars.
What if you could run AWS-scale data centres in orbit? That's the question Ars Technica tackles in the first part of a deep dive into orbital computing infrastructure. SpaceX is looking to build data centres in space that would replicate the sprawling warehouse-sized facilities currently operated by Amazon Web Services, Google and other major cloud providers.
Jupiter's colossal storms generate lightning flashes at least 100 times more powerful than those on Earth, according to new findings from NASA's Juno spacecraft — a mission the Trump administration may be about to kill.
A startup called R3 Bio, backed by billionaire investors, is pursuing a radical approach to replacing laboratory animals: genetically engineering whole organ systems that lack a brain. The company says the long-term goal is to eventually create human versions.
Scotland has become the first part of the United Kingdom to screen newborn babies for spinal muscular atrophy, a rare genetic condition that causes progressive muscle wastage. Campaigners who have long advocated for newborn testing hope the Scottish pilot will result in the heel prick test being approved across the entire UK.
One of NASA's oldest and most productive astronomy missions, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, has been out of action for more than a month as the agency awaits the arrival of a first-of-its-kind commercial rescue mission. The 21-year-old spacecraft is falling out of orbit, and NASA has tapped startup Katalyst Space Technologies with a 30 million dollar contract to save it.
A suspected meteorite crashed through the roof of a home in suburban Houston on Saturday night, punching a hole in the ceiling and landing inside the residence. NASA has confirmed a meteor entered the atmosphere over the area, correlating with reports from residents across the region who heard loud thunder-like noises.
More than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, companies and governments are racing to harvest potato-sized nodules packed with copper, manganese, cobalt and nickel, with 31 initiatives now actively working to commercialise deep-sea mining.
The European Space Agency has re-established contact with a spacecraft that had been considered lost, in a recovery that engineers are describing as a miracle.
Fusion power — the promise of generating vast amounts of clean electricity from nearly limitless fuel — is attracting a new wave of startup investment as multiple companies pursue fundamentally different approaches to achieving the same goal: sustained, net-positive energy from nuclear fusion.
Researchers have identified a previously unknown activation pathway for the human polyomavirus 2, commonly known as the JC virus, which is estimated to silently infect 50 to 90 per cent of adults worldwide. When activated, the virus destroys brain tissue — and the newly discovered trigger could affect up to 10 per cent of adults globally.
Canada has committed 200 million dollars over ten years to build core launch infrastructure at a spaceport near Canso, Nova Scotia, marking the country's most significant investment in domestic space launch capability. The move comes as tensions between Canada and the United States have prompted Ottawa to seek independence from American launch facilities.
A team of scientists has determined that the record-breaking heatwave scorching the western United States this week would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, with temperatures running up to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal for the time of year.
Six teams have reached the final stage of a 30-month quantum computing competition called Quantum for Bio, run by the nonprofit Wellcome Leap, which aims to demonstrate that today's quantum computers can actually benefit human health despite being messy, error-prone and far from the large-scale machines engineers hope to build.
Charles H Bennett and Gilles Brassard have been awarded the Turing Award, computing''s highest honour, for their pioneering work on quantum key distribution. Their BB84 protocol, developed in the 1980s, uses quantum mechanics to create encryption keys that are theoretically impossible to intercept without detection.
Australian researchers have developed what they say is the world's first proof-of-concept quantum battery, a device that uses the principles of quantum mechanics to store energy. The prototype represents a significant step toward fully functioning batteries that could offer dramatically faster charging times than anything currently available.
In what may be the most relatable scientific breakthrough of 2026, researchers have built wearable underwear sensors that track intestinal gas output — and discovered that the average person passes gas approximately 32 times per day.
A new drug is showing promise as the potential breakthrough needed to eliminate sleeping sickness by 2030, the long-standing target set by the global health community for a disease that has terrorised communities across sub-Saharan Africa for generations.
On March 16 1926, Robert Goddard launched a gasoline and liquid oxygen rocket called Nell from a farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. It rose 41 feet, flew for 2.5 seconds, and changed everything.
The UK government is investing 45 million pounds in a new AI-driven supercomputer called Sunrise, designed to model the chaotic physics of nuclear fusion, with the system expected to come online this summer at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham campus.
The Trump administration is preparing plans to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the country''s premier climate and weather research institutions. Proposals include transferring NCAR''s supercomputer to the University of Wyoming and shifting a space weather laboratory to a private company.
NASA has officially cleared its Space Launch System rocket for an April launch carrying four astronauts on a flyby of the Moon, marking the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. The agency completed the latest round of repairs that had delayed the mission from its original 2025 target date.
A NASA satellite that spent over a decade studying the Van Allen radiation belts is about to make an uncontrolled reentry into Earth's atmosphere this week, with a risk to the public that exceeds the government's standard safety threshold.
SpaceX has rolled another Super Heavy booster to the launch pad as Elon Musk acknowledges that the first launch of Starship V3 has slipped from its original timeline. The delay adds pressure as NASA's Artemis III mission in 2027 depends on Starship for its lunar lander.
A new study published in Science has confirmed that NASA's DART spacecraft, which slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022, has permanently altered the asteroid's orbit around the Sun — not just its path around its parent body Didymos.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a construction permit for TerraPower, the nuclear energy company founded by Bill Gates. It is the first such permit the NRC has issued in nearly a decade, marking a significant milestone for the advanced nuclear power industry.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman shook up the Artemis program last week with plans to speed up the lunar return, but a critical question remains unanswered: without the Gateway space station, how will lunar landers rendezvous with the Orion spacecraft?
The NASA Authorization Act of 2026 has been approved by the Senate Commerce Committee, extending the International Space Station to 2032 and directing NASA to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon.
The UK Atomic Energy Authority and CERN have jointly developed mouse-sized robots trained with AI to inspect the Large Hadron Collider's 27-kilometre beam pipes. The tiny bots hunt for deformed RF contacts inside vacuum tubes completely inaccessible to human technicians.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's automated alert system went live on February 24th and immediately bombarded astronomers with 800,000 notifications about asteroids, supernovas, and feeding black holes — a number expected to climb into the millions per night.
NASA announced Friday that it is pushing back its crewed Moon landing from Artemis III in 2027 to Artemis IV in 2028, converting the earlier mission into a test flight after safety advisors highlighted serious risks with the original plan.
Six planets will parade across the sky this weekend in a rare celestial spectacle. Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Neptune, and Uranus will all be visible at the same time in the night sky, though binoculars or a telescope will be needed to spot the latter two.
NASA astronaut Mike Fincke has publicly identified himself as the crew member whose medical emergency prompted the agency's first-ever medical evacuation from the International Space Station.
A clinical trial published in The Lancet shows that orforglipron, a daily GLP-1 pill manufactured by Eli Lilly, achieves greater weight loss than oral semaglutide — potentially offering millions of patients a convenient alternative to injections like Wegovy and Mounjaro.
A mother and daughter team of citizen scientists have discovered what is believed to be the largest coral colony on the Great Barrier Reef — and possibly in the entire world. The find highlights both the reef's enduring capacity to surprise and the vital role amateur researchers play in marine science.
Over the past month, six American companies and a Chinese firm have expressed interest in building orbital data centers, pushing computing infrastructure into space faster than any regulatory framework can keep pace. The trend is driven by AI's insatiable demand for processing power and the growing constraints of terrestrial data center buildouts.
NASA announced Saturday it is taking steps to potentially roll the Artemis II rocket and Orion spacecraft back to the vehicle assembly building at Kennedy Space Center after discovering an interrupted flow of helium, effectively ruling out its March launch target for the first crewed moon mission in over 50 years.
NASA's new administrator has sharply criticised both Boeing and the space agency itself over the bungled Starliner mission that left astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stranded on the International Space Station for nine months instead of the planned eight-day stay.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that broke apart over Europe last year left a massive lithium plume in its wake, according to a new study by scientists who warn the incident highlights growing pollution risks as Earth's atmosphere becomes an increasingly crowded superhighway to space.
A sleeper shark has been filmed for the first time in the frigid waters of Antarctica, upending the widely held scientific assumption that sharks simply could not exist in the continent's near-freezing deep ocean.
As antimicrobial resistance claims over four million lives annually and threatens to double that toll by 2050, bioengineer César de la Fuente at the University of Pennsylvania is deploying AI to search genomes far and deep for peptides with antibiotic properties — including in places no one thought to look.
A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying a crew of astronauts has successfully docked at the International Space Station after launching atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral.
A new crew of US, French and Russian astronauts has launched toward the International Space Station, following a medical evacuation that required the previous crew rotation to be expedited.
Nuclear fusion startup Helion Energy announced its Polaris device has reached 150 million degrees Celsius, a significant milestone that brings the company closer to its ambitious goal of delivering commercial fusion power by 2028.
The El Nino weather pattern is expected to return around June 2026, according to NOAA forecasters, potentially bringing significant shifts in global weather including droughts in some regions and floods in others. The strength of the coming event remains uncertain.
Researchers have published detailed explanations of the biological mechanisms behind rare but dangerous side effects associated with some COVID-19 vaccines. The findings, published in Science, provide the clearest picture yet of why a small fraction of vaccine recipients developed blood clots or heart inflammation while confirming the overall safety profile of the vaccines.
Parkinsons disease appears to disrupt a complex brain network involved in everything from movement to memory, according to new research that may explain why the condition produces such a wide range of symptoms.