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A clever swap has extended the historic Voyager 2’s mission in interstellar space. Engineers are hoping to do the same for Voyager 1. An ambitious effort to boost an aging probe on its journey through the uncharted territory of interstellar space seems to have found success. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have spent the last few months implementing what they nicknamed the “Big Bang” fix to buy the historic Voyager 2 spacecraft more time to continue its science mission. Voyager 2 is roughly 21.35 billion kilometers (13 billion miles) away from Earth, while its twin, Voyager...

This artist’s concept shows the red supergiant star Betelgeuse and a companion star orbiting within the supergiant’s tenuous outer atmosphere. Artwork: NASA, ESA, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI); Science: Andrea Dupree (CfA) Betelgeuse has always been something of a mystery. And by “mystery,” I mean a source of endless fun, fascination and frustration for astronomers. Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the sky, marking the right shoulder of the constellation Orion. It’s a red supergiant, a massive star with more than a dozen times the sun’s heft, that’s blasting out many tens of thousands as much light as our own...

At the quantum scale, tiny particles behave in bizarre ways. One reason for this is the uncertainty principle, which says that the more you know about where a quantum particle is, the less you can know about how fast it’s moving, and vice versa. The new uncertainty principle relates to fractals, shapes that remain equally complex no matter how much you zoom in on them. Around a decade ago, Semyon Dyatlov was studying whether quantum particles behave differently than ordinary particles when put into the same chaotic situations. Sometimes, an object moving chaotically can become trapped into following a fractal-like...

Researchers are shell-shocked at the latest marine discovery. Dolphins have been filmed using shells to ensnare their prey off the coast of Australia, marking the first time this clever tactic has been caught on camera, per a bombshell paper in Marine Mammal Science. “The second I saw that shell in the air, I immediately knew what was happening,” the study’s head author, Alexis Levengood, a marine mammal biologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, told ScienceAlert. Levengood said she and her team were on a research vessel off Hervey Bay when they spotted a female Pacific bottlenose...

Popocatepetl volcano is just east of Mexico city and is the 5th highest peak in North America ( 17,694 feet (5,393 meters) tall.) It is erupting steam right now. You can slide the time backward to see the last 12 hours. This mountain is where I did my first technical climb following the "Ventorillo Route" up the inactive vent on the right hand skyline, across the saddle and up the glacier to the summit.

Jacob Tsimerman won the biggest prize in math. Now he’s working on the most important problem of his career.When he won the Fields Medal last week, Jacob Tsimerman accepted the most prestigious honor in math wearing a powder-blue tuxedo with satin lapels.Then he made an announcement as striking as his tux. After the ceremony, the four winning mathematicians were asked what they planned to do next. One said he would keep working on partial differential equations, one said he wanted to experiment with artificial intelligence and one said she had absolutely no idea. That left Tsimerman.“I’ll be starting a position...

Project Hail Mary is my favourite movie of the year, and while many people have made videos explaining time dilation due to travelling close to the speed of light, nobody has tried to visualise how the universe appears to warp due to relativistic aberration. I wanted to create these visuals to give you an idea of what it would look like at these speeds, even without a warp drive or hyperspace nothing looks right. Travelling At 99% of The Speed Of Light Looks Strange - Project Hail Mary's Space Warp | 11:09 Scott Manley | 1.87M subscribers | 168,417 views...

We are finally getting a clearer picture of what happened during COVID. Not because the people who locked us up, masked our faces and forced unproven chemicals into our bodies have suddenly become transparent, but because Anthony Fauci’s COVID-era diary is coming into public view. This long document makes one thing painfully clear: the people who forced us to surrender our lives to their expertise did not have the expertise they claimed. At best, they were guessing. And when their guesses failed, they did not retreat. They didn’t come clean. They doubled down. Arrogance unbridled.. Our health, our freedoms, our...

Explanation: Solar System bodies make deep space exploration more fuel efficient! Today’s video shows the Psyche spacecraft gaining speed and changing its trajectory with minimal fuel spent due to a gravity assist from Mars in May 2026. Mars has an average orbital speed of almost 87,000 km/h (54,000 mph) around the Sun. Its orbital motion and its gravity allowed Mars to pull Psyche along with it, increasing the spacecraft’s speed. Gravity assists have been used since 1959’s Luna 3 mission to allow for spacecraft (the Voyagers, Cassini) to reach farther than they could with fuel alone. This assist helped the...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Science has declined to answer any questions to avoid incriminating itself for crimes it may have committed. Upon being brought in for a Congressional hearing over its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Science stated that it was advised by its attorneys to not answer questions so as to not to provide damaging witness against itself. "Science has elected to exercise its fifth amendment right to not provide testimony that may be used against it in criminal proceedings," said Science's attorney Jay Varner. "This decision should in no way be taken as an admission of guilt by Science....

But it's not what you thinkFunding for scientific research in the United States is at a record low after the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in research grants last year, derailing work focused on diversity, climate change, and other hot-button topics. SNIP The site, more commonly associated with adult content, is increasingly a haven for other types of creators, of which scientists make up a very small fraction. Today, you can subscribe to OnlyMarms, which promises “Unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies” delivered as near-daily photos and videos of chubby, personable marmots (with charming names like Staple,...

Around 80 million years ago, a stretch of tropical coastline in what is now north-eastern Italy was lashed by monsoon rains and tropical cyclones. Those storms swept dinosaur carcasses, crocodiles, plants and river mud onto a tidal flat, where the tides and a film of microbes sealed everything away with extraordinary preservation.My colleagues and I have published a new study that reconstructs the violent tropical climate behind the Villaggio del Pescatore Lagerstätte near Trieste and reveals it preserves just four decades of life, recorded almost day by day. The Villaggio del Pescatore site near Trieste is one of the most...

Ask someone who investigates foodborne illness for a living what they won't put on their plate, and the list is shorter—and stranger—than you'd expect. It's not that these experts live in fear. Most will tell you that all food carries some risk, and the real skill is deciding which risks are worth taking. Frank Yiannas, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s former deputy commissioner for food policy and response, says he doesn't think of foods as simply "good" or "bad." Instead, "I approach everything with what I would say is a quantitative risk assessment," he says. "I'm calculated." Still, after...

A groundbreaking mission that explored Pluto and distant solar system objects in unprecedented detail has awakened from its longest sleep ever — and it’s 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer. The mission’s flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region...

The space between stars just got a little sweeter. Astronomers have detected a type of sugar in space that's also found in raspberries and self-tanners. The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in what's called the interstellar medium: thin clouds of gas and dust littered between stars. Sugar does more than sweeten tea and powder doughnuts. Different varieties fuel our cells and even make up DNA. Scientists are itching to know how sugars form because they're a key ingredient for life as we know it. Using two dish-shaped radio telescopes in Spain, researchers collected data from a large gas cloud near the...

A detailed view of Halley's Comet in the Bayeux Tapestry. Image credit: Unknown author via Wikimedia Commons (public domain) ============================================================================ The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most famous textile works in the world, and for the first time in more than 900 years it has returned to England to be exhibited at the British Museum. The work of art depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings of 1066 and the Norman conquest of England. It also depicts an important astronomical event, the return of Halley’s comet. Although not in the right place. First of all, despite...

The boy was around 14 when he joined the Continental Army. He signed his enlistment papers with an “X,” suggesting that he’d never learned to write his name. During his three-and-a-half-year military career, he marched more than 1,000 miles. When he died at the Battle of Camden in South Carolina in 1780, he was buried in an unmarked grave and forgotten for nearly 250 years. Researchers excavated the boy’s remains in 2022. Now, they’ve discovered this young soldier’s identity: His name was Private John Pumphrey, and he was one of America’s oldest John Doe cases. “As far as we knew,...

Satellites don't always stay in orbit. As they get closer to Earth, atmospheric drag can pull them lower and lower until they burn up, with solar activity speeding up the process. NASA's Swift Space Observatory is facing that fate -- its orbit is decaying, and if left alone, it will be destroyed in a matter of months. But in a first-of-its-kind mission, Katalyst Space, a startup, is teaming up with NASA to try and rescue Swift using the company's newly developed robotic spacecraft, LINK. "This is a historic mission, you know, some would call it the first of its kind,...

The colossal Stratolaunch carrier plane rolled out of its hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California, today (May 31) to undergo fueling tests. It's the first public look at the full craft —which is designed to launch rockets into orbit from the sky — since construction began. "We're excited to announce that Stratolaunch aircraft has reached a major milestone in its journey toward providing convenient, reliable, and routine access to low-Earth orbit," Stratolaunch Systems Corp. CEO Jean Floyd said in a statement. "This marks the completion of the initial aircraft-construction phase and the beginning of the...

Explanation: Sometimes we can all use a little help from a friend. NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory needs a boost to stay in orbit after almost 22 years of service. This video shows an artist's visualization of the Swift Boost Mission: The Katalyst's LINK spacecraft was launched aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket on July 3 and it is now en route to rendezvous with Swift and boost it to a higher orbit over the course of the next several months. This type of maneuver has never been attempted before. If successful, it will be the technology demonstration of...