NASA has completed an unprecedented pair of powered Earth flybys, sending its twin ESCAPADE spacecraft toward Mars after nearly a year in space. The maneuvers, performed on November 7 and 9, mark the first time the agency has used this technique to propel spacecraft toward the Red Planet. The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) launched in November 2025 aboard Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, during the vehicle’s second flight. Instead of traveling directly to Mars, the spacecraft followed an unusual looping trajectory that brought them back toward Earth in November 2026. The mission’s unconventional route resulted from…
Author: Michael
Sundrop is a new iPhone app that uses Apple’s on-device AI to help parents rediscover their favorite photos and create keepsakes without uploading images to the cloud.
An international collaboration of physicists has presented its first results in its search for hypothetical particles that could help to explain the vast disparity between the strength of gravity and the three fundamental forces described by the Standard Model. Following three years of data collection at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)’s FASER experiment, the FASER Collaboration found no evidence for these heavy, slow-moving “quirks.”
Who’d have thought that pumping cans of cheap and colorful caffeine bombs into every gas station in the country could be bad for public health? Most people probably at least suspect that energy drinks aren’t the best thing to put in our bodies. Still, a recent preliminary study by the American Heart Association found that the energy drinks’ impact on the human heart over time is worse than you might imagine. The new research took a look at over 28,300 health events reported to the US Food and Drug Administration between 2017 and 2025. Broadly, researchers found that energy drinks…
MAGA failed because it didn’t go far enough, right-wing extremists say—and following devastating midterm losses, they see an opportunity to take over.
Hydrogen could play an important role in cleaner energy systems, but even small leaks can create safety risks. Reliable sensors are therefore essential wherever hydrogen is produced, stored, transported or used. A persistent problem is humidity: water molecules can cover the active surfaces of hydrogen detectors and prevent them from responding accurately, particularly in hot, moisture-rich environments.
Quantum chemistry can be used to calculate the probabilities of which chemical processes will occur. This involves a great deal of programming work. Dr. Michael F. Peintinger from the Mulliken Center for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Bonn has investigated what happens when artificial intelligence is used for this purpose. His work is published in the Journal of Computational Chemistry.
A powerful meteor exploded over Cape Cod Bay on May 30, 2026, releasing energy equivalent to hundreds of tons of TNT. Scientists have now traced the object to an unusual orbit stretching toward Jupiter, revealing how the giant planet’s gravity may have redirected a small asteroid onto a collision course with Earth. A Daytime Fireball That Shook the Massachusetts Coast At approximately 1:06 p.m. local time, residents across coastal Massachusetts witnessed an unusual sight: a brilliant fireball streaking through the daytime sky. Moments later, a sonic boom rolled across parts of the northeastern United States, signaling that something substantial had…
A 28-year-old man got a little bit more than he bargained for after a life-saving brain surgery. Karl (last name withheld for privacy) sees features of his grey tabby cat, Luna, on the human faces he encounters throughout the day. He’ll see Luna’s almond-shaped eye sockets, enlarged pupils, or stripes on humans, if her face is the first one he sees in the morning. Alternatively, he may see human features on the cat if he sees a human face at the beginning of his day. Karl’s feline ordeal is detailed in a report published in the December 2026 issue of…
Evaluating the annual global temperatures each year requires context. There is a fair amount of natural variability from one year to the next, so it’s important to focus on the trend over time. Famously, global warming did not end in 1998, as some claimed a couple of decades ago—we just had a run of La-Niña-dominated years after a very strong El Niño. Annual greenhouse gas emissions are much less variable, having increased fairly steadily, but many complicating factors can still muddy the picture. Sometimes those factors conspire to throw a year off the trend. It looks like 2026 will be…