Two nearly spherical dinosaur eggs recovered from eastern China have drawn international attention not because of what they preserved, but because of what they did not. When researchers sectioned the 13-centimeter specimens from Anhui Province, they discovered that their interiors were completely filled with calcite crystals, not embryonic remains. The eggs were excavated from the
Water flowing out. Data flowing in. A water system activation at the Thad Cochran Test Stand (B-2) on Jan. 30 at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, helped capture critical data to support testing a new SLS (Space Launch System) stage expected to fly on the Artemis IV mission. The activation milestone
In Yellowstone National Park, a bulge the size of 279 football fields has risen by an inch since last July. With no signs of slowing down, the bump that’s roughly 19 miles across may cause some worry that the iconic locale’s hibernating supervolcano is readying for an apocalyptic reawakening. Although impressed by the situation, the
Humans are spending more time in outer space than ever, and we’re bringing our gonads with us. But scientists are concerned that sexual health in space is a ‘policy blind spot’ that needs to be taken more seriously. Spending extended time in space wreaks havoc on the body: cosmic radiation is unavoidable, microgravity makes everything
In 2025, scientists reported the discovery of long-chain organic molecules called alkanes in the ancient mudstones of Mars. Now, in a new study, a team led by Alexander Pavlov of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center argues that their inferred original abundance of these molecules, before millions of years of radiation destroyed much of them, is
Top of an RBMK at the Leningrad plant. Control panels of a pre-digitalization nuclear plant look quite daunting, with countless dials, buttons and switches that all make perfect sense to a trained operator, but seem as random as those of the original Enterprise bridge in Star Trek to the average person. This makes the reconstruction
A United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket carrying a suite of classified Space Force payloads suffered what appeared to be a burn-through at or near the nozzle of a strap-on solid-fuel booster Thursday but apparently made an otherwise “nominal” ascent to space, the company said. The two-stage Vulcan rocket thundered to life at 4:22 a.m. EST
Out beyond the orbit of Neptune lies an expansive ring of ancient relics, dynamical enigmas, and possibly a hidden planet—or two. The Kuiper Belt, a region of frozen debris about 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than the Earth is—and perhaps farther, though nobody knows—has been shrouded in mystery since it first came
The last common ancestor of all living things did not just suddenly appear on Earth roughly 4.2 billion years ago. Some of its genes came from an even older and more mysterious source… “While the last universal common ancestor is the most ancient organism we can study with evolutionary methods,” explains biologist Aaron Goldman from
For countless ages, a small chunk of ice and dust traveled alone through interstellar space, like a sealed bottle drifting across a vast cosmic sea. This summer, that traveler entered our solar system and received the name 3I/ATLAS, becoming only the third confirmed interstellar comet ever observed. When researchers at Auburn University aimed NASA’s Neil