A NASA-funded satellite built to inspect inactive spacecraft in Earth’s orbit has been declared unrecoverable after a software malfunction disabled its communications system, ending an ambitious technology demonstration before its primary objectives could begin. A Software Failure Silenced the Spacecraft Shortly After Launch The Small Spacecraft Propulsion and Inspection Capability (SSPICY) mission, developed by Starfish Space with NASA support, launched on October 1 to demonstrate technologies that could transform how satellites are inspected and serviced in orbit. At the center of the mission was Otter, a compact spacecraft designed to approach inactive orbital objects using advanced navigation and propulsion systems. According to NASA, Starfish Space successfully established initial contact with Otter following deployment. The spacecraft then entered commissioning, a phase during which engineers activate onboard systems, calibrate equipment, and prepare a satellite for operations. Communication was lost during this process. Despite subsequent troubleshooting by NASA and Starfish engineers, the company could not restore two-way contact with the spacecraft. Investigators eventually identified a problem involving Otter’s fault protection system, the onboard software responsible for detecting malfunctions and responding to potential threats. Instead of protecting the spacecraft, the system was erroneously keeping its radio switched off. With no viable means of restoring…

Typically, when a bear catches a nutritious salmon, they don’t eat it under a rushing waterfall. But one unnamed black bear (Ursus americanus) eating at Anan Creek in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest decided to park underneath a waterfall and enjoy his fishy snack.  For this culinary innovation, the U.S. Forest Service team at Tongass National Forest has awarded the unnamed bear with the 2026 Shower Beer award.  “After watching this relaxed black bear gnawing on a salmon under rushing waters, we’re wondering if it might catch on—like the ursine equivalent of the shower beer,” the team writes. “The more you watch, the more sense it makes. No mess and no need to move to start fishing again. This bear may be on to something.” Meet Bears of Anan Creek The rangers at Tongass National Forest are currently awarding the Anan Bear Awards to the 39 bears spotted at the Anan Wildlife Observatory over the summer.  Tongass is the largest national forest in the United States, and covers most of southeastern Alaska, including the capital city of Juneau. The area includes Mendanhall Glacier (a popular destination for Alaskan cruises), hiking trails, eagles soaring above, and plenty of bears. One of the…

Elon Musk almost single-handedly funded the Republican midterms push. But of every traceable dollar Musk put into races that have been decided, more than 99 cents went to a race he lost.

Children’s developmental readiness in kindergarten can predict their math achievement as late as ninth grade, according to research from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

Research led by a University of Wollongong (UOW) Ph.D. candidate may have solved one of Earth’s most perplexing geological mysteries: What caused the Great Unconformity?

English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages are all members of the Germanic language group, spoken by hundreds of millions of people today. But where did these languages come from?

Even the world’s most powerful telescopes have their blind spots. Although NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can peer billions of years into the past, it still struggles to photograph planets orbiting nearby stars. Stars shine with such extraordinary brightness that their glare overwhelms nearby planets’ faint glow.

Researchers from the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (AIRCAS) used satellite images collected across the growing season to map shrub cover in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, China. By tracking seasonal differences in growth, they were able to distinguish shrub patches from dense grass, which can look similar in a single image.

New research challenges a longstanding explanation for why the immune system attacks healthy tissues in lupus. Scientists investigating lupus have discovered that errors in immune cells may cause the body to attack some of its own defenses. In a study of 34 patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), 33 had neutrophils containing widespread abnormalities in […]

Scientists at Virginia Tech have developed a technique that uses vibrations and artificial intelligence to estimate how deeply rocks are buried. The technology could help future robots on Mars and the Moon identify hidden obstacles before attempting to excavate them, reducing wasted energy and the risk of equipment damage. Why Hidden Rocks Pose a Serious Challenge for Mars Exploration A rock protruding from the Martian surface may look like a small obstacle, but its visible dimensions reveal little about what lies underneath. It could be a loose stone that a robotic excavator can easily remove, or the exposed tip of a massive boulder extending deep into the ground. For autonomous machines operating millions of miles from Earth, distinguishing between these possibilities could determine whether an excavation succeeds or fails. Current landing-site assessments consider factors such as terrain elevation, surface roughness, and the height of visible rocks. Yet these measurements cannot reliably reveal the underground extent of an obstacle. A robot attempting to remove an embedded boulder could expend valuable energy, wear down its tools, or damage its excavation equipment. These risks become especially significant during missions where resources are limited and direct human intervention is impossible. Yiyan Ruan works with…

President Donald Trump spent Tuesday evening in disbelief as the walls of his carefully crafted alternate reality came crashing down around him. On his social media echo chamber Truth Social, Trump took cheap shots at senators in his party who suffered humiliating defeats in Republican strongholds, lashed out at his allies at Fox News — going as far as to text one of its hosts in fury — and even vowed to become a “political pundit.” Meanwhile, as he watched his personal picks fall one by one, what was left of his deserted social media platform crumbled to dust. Shares of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), crashed to an all-time low of just $5.23 Wednesday morning, after already spending much of the year circling the drain. Shares are now hovering around $5.30, dropping more than 10 percent overnight — and a stomach-churning 60 percent since the beginning of this year. It’s yet another massive defeat for a company that has struggled to justify its own existence, let alone convince investors of pivots that have yet to pay off in any meaningful way. The company has attempted to reinvent itself several times, from major investments in…

For months, election deniers claimed without evidence that the vote would be rigged. Now they appear to be accepting crushing defeats.

A construction project for a new elementary school in Leipzig, Germany, has uncovered a 7,000-year-old burial, the oldest grave ever identified within the city’s boundaries. Archaeologists also discovered the remains of several prehistoric wooden houses, linking the site to the Linear Pottery culture, one of Europe’s earliest farming societies. Located in the Leipzig Lowland Basin, the site was already considered promising because of its proximity to a previously identified Bronze Age archaeological site. Its position, protected from flooding by the nearby White Elster River, had also favored the preservation of prehistoric remains. What researchers found exceeded expectations. Despite the presence of a building complex constructed during the 1960s and later demolished, the ground preserved evidence of a much older settlement. Among the remains was an unusually well-preserved human skeleton. A Construction Project Uncovers The Past The excavation revealed a human skeleton buried in a crouched position, lying on its left side with its legs drawn toward the body. Archaeologists have not yet established the individual’s age or sex. The Saxony State Office for Archaeology pointed the exceptional preservation of the burial, noting that skeletal remains rarely survive in large parts of Saxony. In many cases, ancient graves can only be…

A common nutritional supplement has shown unexpected promise in treating psoriasis. A widely available nutritional supplement may help reduce the immune system activity responsible for psoriasis, according to new research from China. Scientists found that pantethine, a derivative of vitamin B5 commonly used to lower cholesterol, can interfere with metabolic processes that drive inflammation. The […]

Instructors and students have significantly different perceptions of how much generative artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in university studies, according to new research from The University of Manchester and Spain’s Universidad del Pais Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea.

For six decades, wildlife researchers have faced a persistent challenge: to attach a tracking device to study a wild animal, they first have to catch it. Now, a new approach developed at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) allows GPS collars to be deployed autonomously on free-roaming terrestrial wildlife. Published in BioScience, the proof-of-concept study demonstrates Capture-Free Telemetry (CFT), a technique that places tracking devices on wild animals as they interact with baited deployment units in their natural habitat.

Titan OS has raised $110 million in funding to date

In late 2020, after months of forcing employees back to the assembly line in the midst of a growing pandemic, Elon Musk decided he’d had enough of being held accountable by regulators in California — and moved to Texas. “California has been winning for a long time, and I think they’re taking it for granted,” Musk said at the time. “Silicon Valley has too much influence in the world.” The move, largely seen as a way to avoid regulatory hurdles, environmental laws, and progressive taxation, culminated in Musk moving the headquarters of both Tesla and SpaceX to the Lone Star state. South Texas is now home to SpaceX’s so-called “Starbase,” a massive and growing rocket development campus that has run run foul of both locals and federal regulators alike. But now, after a historic landslide victory for Democrats this week, Musk’s decision to go all-in on Texas — not to mention the whopping $474 million he spent on supporting Republican nominees nationwide — is looking like a drastic misfire. Democrats swept Texas, with voters picking James Talarico as senator, Gina Hinojosa as governor, and Nathan Johnson as attorney general. The stock market immediately punished Musk for the humiliating defeat, with…

Researchers at Cortical Labs in Australia have attached lab-grown neurons to a robotic dog and used them to steer it toward a goal on a simple map. The demonstration shows living cells directing a machine in the physical world, rather than only inside a computer. Computer chips built on living neurons are drawing attention because the human brain runs on far less power than sophisticated AI and remains much better at handling the unfamiliar. The robot dog is the latest demonstration of that idea, and it follows earlier experiments with the same technology. The work sits at an early stage. It is not particularly fast or efficient yet, but it gives a tangible picture of what biological computing might one day do. How the Neurons Drive the Robot? The neurons are grown right on the chip, which is fitted with electrodes that carry electrical signals in both directions. That two-way channel is what lets the team turn activity in a small group of neurons into movement for the attached robot. Feedback loops of electrical signals were used to get the dog to its target. “The robotic dog is a simple demonstration of how progress in biological systems can also be…

In recent weeks, people across Australia have found fluttering bogong moths (Agrotis infusa) in their homes, cars and even bedrooms. These insects have embarked on their annual migration from breeding grounds across southern Australia to the cool caves of the Australian Alps.

The mangroves of Biscayne Bay have been getting help from an unlikely neighbor—the seagrass meadows just offshore. Dead seagrass blades and seaweed drift loose until the tide carries them into the mangroves, where they pile up, rot slowly and then become part of the ground.

As the Mediterranean Sea continues to warm, it may become more favorable for some tropical tuna species. However, warmer waters do not necessarily provide all the environmental conditions these highly migratory fish need.

A comprehensive study of earwax reveals a combination of slippery and sticky properties that may protect against insect invasions of the ear.

New findings could help explain why cognitive exhaustion feels so crummy

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars means nothing to Elon Musk, director Alex Gibney says.

When the temples and pyramids of Ake started to fall apart, its residents stayed put. A new study shows they made homes among the debris and lived there for about 450 years. Ake is an ancestral Maya city in what is now Yucatán, Mexico. Like many prosperous cities in the northern Yucatán Peninsula, it collapsed into ruin at the end of the Classic Period. It would be easy to assume the story stopped there. Yet archaeological research published in Latin American Antiquity by University of Virginia anthropologist Roberto Rosado-Ramirez tells another tale. Ake lost its power, but its people would not leave. The study pushes back against a “modern, Western understanding of ancestral Maya ruins as abandoned spaces.” From Splendor to Stone Heaps At its peak, Ake was an impressive place. Its center held a paved plaza, and that plaza was ringed by seven stone buildings. Beyond the city itself, a road 42 feet wide connected Ake to the regional center of Izamal, roughly 20 miles away. That order did not last. Between 1000 and 1100 C.E., political turmoil and drought struck the region, and upkeep of the site began to decline. In fact, the trouble had started even earlier:…

Glade Brook, Coatue and T. Rowe Price were among the investors that led the share sale.

Nicholas Coles, Ph.D., had long heard that forcing a smile can make you feel a little happier—after all, he had done a lot of the research that supposedly proved it. But something didn’t sit quite right with his own findings.

A research team led by Professor Li Xiaofeng from the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOCAS) has developed a model to forecast internal solitary waves originating from multiple sources in the Sulu Sea. The model combines physical equations and satellite observations to predict wave arrival times and crest positions across this complex marine environment.

The AI minister now concedes the estimated figure is less than a third of that. Researchers blame the country’s slow rate of adoption

While some of Donald Trump’s closest allies have remained silent, much of MAGA is blaming him for historic losses.

The first clue was a set of scorched bronze fragments. In June, volunteers sweeping a forest in northeastern Poland with metal detectors dug up pieces of a bronze ornament and several fibulae, ancient brooches used to fasten clothing, covered in the discolored crust that metal takes on after passing through fire. The burning mattered. It suggested the objects had gone onto a funeral pyre, and the volunteers suspected they were standing on an old cemetery. Professional excavations have since confirmed it: a burial ground of the Wielbark culture, a people most researchers link to the Goths, in use from around the 3rd century AD until the end of the 5th. The site lies somewhere in the woods managed by the Krynki Forest District in Podlasie, near Poland’s border with Belarus. Exactly where is a secret, iSokolka reported on October 27. Melted Bronze Under the Forest Floor The searchers belong to Magna Silva, a group of history enthusiasts within the Association of Friends of the Knyszyn Forest, known locally as “Wielki Las,” or “Great Forest.” Their search was legal and carried out under Poland’s rules for metal detecting, according to the forest district. Members of the Magna Silva volunteer group work…

Deep beneath Earth’s surface, some minerals hold clues to processes that happened millions of years ago. One such mineral is lawsonite, which forms under high pressure and relatively low temperatures. What makes it significant is its ability to store water within its crystal structure and carry it deep into Earth as tectonic plates move beneath one another.

Research out of South Dakota State University has highlighted a potential connection between limited exposure to cold stress during pregnancy and birth weight. The work showed that shearing ewes at day 50 of gestation, rather than after 100 days, resulted in larger and heavier lambs at birth.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show. FACT: Holding a pair of giant balls while you nap really could help make you more creative By Rachel Feltman The internet insists that Edison, Tesla, Einstein, Da Vinci, and Dalí all shared this own cool hack: they napped while holding something heavy, so the clatter would wake them mid-dream and they could grab hold of their unconscious musings before they evaporated. I could only really find a direct source linking such practices to one of them: Dalí. But modern science suggests he may have been on to something. In 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, the artist describes “slumber with a key,” which involves a bony Spanish-style armchair, a heavy key, and a plate on the floor.…

Scientists have discovered a compound that transforms a natural muscle-repair protein into a more powerful version dubbed “Super HGF,” more than doubling its ability to bind to a key receptor while protecting it from age-related chemical damage. The breakthrough, supported by early mouse experiments, could eventually help combat muscle loss and preserve strength as people age.

Scroll through Instagram long enough and you’ll meet an influencer who isn’t real. AI influencers—computer-generated personalities like Lil Miquela, who has millions of followers and has posted for Prada, Samsung and Dior—look and act like human creators, but they’re entirely synthetic. Brands like them because they never go off-script, never age and never cause a scandal. Yet they share one stubborn weakness: people tend not to trust them.

Astronomers have identified a giant exoplanet with an unusually elongated orbit around a star much hotter than the Sun. Known as TOI-1355 b, the planet completes one revolution in roughly two Earth days, yet its orbital behavior differs sharply from that of many similar gas giants. The team at the University of Tokyo working with international collaborators said that their research focuses on planetary systems around hot stars, an area of astronomy that remains less explored than systems surrounding cooler stars. The planet also presents a challenge for future observations. Its changing orbital orientation is expected to make its transits invisible from Earth after approximately 2033, leaving researchers with a limited opportunity to study its characteristics before that alignment changes. A Hot Jupiter On A Strange Path TOI-1355 b belongs to a class of planets called hot Jupiters. These massive gas giants orbit extremely close to their host stars, completing a full revolution in only a few days. Most have nearly circular orbits, making its elongated trajectory particularly unusual. The planet’s host star is another distinguishing feature. Its surface temperature reaches approximately 8,400 degrees Celsius (15,152 degrees Fahrenheit), compared with about 5,500 degrees Celsius (9,932 degrees Fahrenheit) for the Sun.…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These startups hope “blended” food will cut our appetite for red meat  In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge served hungry students steaming marinara sauce and meatballs. The students loved them: 92% of those who tried them wanted them on the menu. Few could guess that mushrooms had been mixed into the meat. Dodge was testing a new product called 50/Cut from the company Joyn. The blend of seemingly simple ingredients—available as meatballs, burgers, and ground meat—could help solve one of the biggest challenges of the climate crisis: getting people to eat less meat, particularly beef. Joyn is among a wave of startups creating “blended meat,” which combines plant proteins with the real deal. The logic: The best meat replacement is … better meat. Get a taste of the startups betting on greener beef. —Meghan McCarron This implant can restore sight for patients with macular degeneration More than 5 million people have an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) called geographic atrophy, in which retinal cells die off. Until now, no treatment could restore their…

In some lakes around the world, including some in China, cyanobacterial blooms are increasingly managed through large-scale mechanical harvesting to improve water quality and ensure a continued supply of drinking water.

Today is the day to join TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 in Boston’s SoWa Power Station. Register now to join this founder-focused conference today.

A sales representative asks an AI agent for customer pricing, and the agent pulls data from multiple sources: restricted pricing systems, internal communications, and archived quotes. The output looks accurate to the agent, so a second agent uses the data to draft the proposal for the sales rep. No human checks either handoff. When it’s discovered that the proposal includes unapproved, confidential, and sensitive information, no one can trace where the problematic data entered the workflow or how it spread across systems, files, and agents. DOWNLOAD THE REPORT This scenario illustrates why AI governance needs to evolve, rapidly and dynamically. As more enterprises begin to use agentic AI in daily workflows, they’re realizing that they must manage more than static files; they must manage moving and fragmented data that is continuously ingested, copied, summarized, transformed, reused, and redistributed in new forms. In short, AI security isn’t a tool problem; it’s a data visibility problem. Consequently, traditional security approaches built solely around applications, systems, networks, or endpoints are no longer sufficient. Securing agentic AI at scale requires understanding how data moves. Teams, therefore, need to establish data lineage in order to effectively manage governance, accountability, and trust across human, agentic, and…

A mere 63 light-years from Earth lurks an enormous structure that spans around 1,000 astronomical units — or 93 billion miles — with the evocative nickname of “Cat’s Tail.” The structure, believed to be largely made of dust, is located in the Beta Pictoris star system, and was first directly observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in infrared light. Now, thanks to new images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, we get to the see the tail in visible light as well, revealing a bizarre tail-like protrusion sticking out of the plane of a gargantuan, disk-shaped accumulation of cosmic dust. As detailed in an article published last month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team led by researchers at the University of Arizona were intrigued to get a closer look at the structure using the Hubble. “Oddly, this feature had previously only been seen with the James Webb Space Telescope, which detects infrared light, but remained invisible at shorter wavelengths, which has puzzled the community for a while,” said research lead and University of Arizona doctoral student Arin Avsar in a statement. “We think the Cat’s Tail has eluded our observations in visible light until now because of what…

After decades of establishing itself as one of the worst guardians of personal data, Meta raised eyebrows this year by encouraging users to hand over their email logins and credit card information to its new AI agent, Muse. The tool, a privacy nightmare anthropomorphized by a furry apparition, can crawl through years of personal instant messages and even glean highly sensitive information by accessing entire email inboxes, from long-forgotten exchanges with exes to passport numbers. To Meta’s former security chief Alex Stamos, it’s a “totally insane” idea to hand over some of this data, as Business Insider reports. During a recent appearance on Alex Kantrowitz’s “Big Technology Podcast,” Stamos discussed how some users are going as far as to hand over their password vaults, effectively giving Muse control over their entire digital lives. It’s not just Muse hoping to cash in on the trend. Viral personal AI assistant startup Instinct, which was founded by a 23-year-old research scientist months ago and raised $1 billion in a September funding round, is similarly developing agents that can autonomously complete day-to-day tasks. As a result, the financial world has a major headache on its hands as it tries to separate out legitimate users…

Shiloh Attoun threw the rock because he was bored. It struck another stone on the slope of Tel Gezer, an ancient mound in central Israel, and knocked loose something round and shiny. It was a scarab amulet about 3,300 years old, carved with two cobras and an Egyptian hieroglyph meaning “lord.” The Israel Antiquities Authority announced the find on Tuesday, November 3. Attoun, 17, had been in Israel for two days. The American student was on his class’s first field trip of the year with Jewish National Fund-USA’s Muss High School in Israel study-abroad program, touring Tel Gezer National Park in the Judean lowlands, The Times of Israel reported. Two Days in the Country In a video released by JNF-USA, Attoun said the group had just passed the park gates and was hiking up toward an ancient altar. He picked up the object his rock had exposed, turned it over and saw two marks that reminded him of the Hebrew letter Nun. He showed it to Benji Hain, the program’s dean of students. Hain’s face lit up, Attoun recalled, and he started jumping, telling the teenager he didn’t understand what he had found. US student Shiloh Attoun holds the ancient…

A clean break in 99-million-year-old amber offers rare direct evidence that ancient lizards shed their tails using a defensive mechanism still common today. A lizard can escape a predator by leaving its tail behind, sometimes with the detached piece still wriggling as the animal makes its getaway. It’s a remarkable defense, but scientists have struggled […]

“No” may be one of the hardest words for parents to say to a young child.

MIT scientists have challenged two decades of conventional thinking by discovering that flexible molecular connections, rather than rigid ones, can unlock entirely new ways to arrange nanoparticles. The breakthrough could lead to a new generation of designer materials with unusual properties and applications in electronics, medicine, and energy.

A new study led by the ICARUS Climate Research Center at Maynooth University in Ireland has reconstructed a century of Irish sea-level change, revealing a stark acceleration in sea-level rise. The research, titled “A Century of Sea-Level Change in Ireland (1925–2024)” and published in Ocean Science, combines tide-gauge records from six locations, including newly digitized historical records from Cork, Tarbert and Galway.

Three fossilized eggs from China have given paleontologists a rare glimpse of dinosaur reproduction. Using a neutron source, researchers found that oviraptorid embryos developed at different speeds, which suggests the chicks did not all hatch together. Oviraptorids were two-legged dinosaurs that lived in Central Asia during the Upper Cretaceous, from 88 to 66 million years ago. Until now, researchers had assumed their reproductive biology sat somewhere between that of modern crocodiles and birds. Crocodiles bury their eggs, and the young hatch at the same time, while birds often hatch at different times in the nest. A team from the University of Bonn, working with scientists from Taiwan, Switzerland and the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Zentrum (MLZ) in Garching, set out to see how differently the embryos in three oviraptorid eggs had progressed. A Clutch Found Together The remains were about 67 million years old and came from the Ganzhou Basin in Jiangxi Province, China. What set them apart was that they were found together. According to Thomas Engler of the University of Bonn’s Institute for Geosciences, oviraptorid eggs turn up fairly often in Central Asia, but most are removed from the context of their discovery. Once that happens, it is frequently impossible…