Science

SANTA FE, N.M. — Tory Bruno, who recently stepped down as chief executive of United Launch Alliance, is joining Blue Origin as head of the company’s new national security business unit. Blue Origin announced Dec. 26 on social media that it hired Bruno as president of national security, reporting to Chief Executive Dave Limp. Bruno

Stuck in front of our screens all day, we often ignore our senses beyond sound and vision. And yet they are always at work. When we’re more alert, we feel the rough and smooth surfaces of objects, the stiffness in our shoulders, the softness of bread. In the morning, we may feel the tingle of

The borderlands of black holes ought to be chaotic spaces where the rate at which matter is drawn across into oblivion is held back only by the blinding fury of radiation spilling away from the edge of darkness. This zone is considered to be unstable, prone to flares, jets, and outbursts. Yet, predicting these dynamic

A tiny robot so small it can barely be seen can still “sense, think, and act” autonomously, according to the engineers who built it. To the team’s best knowledge, this joint invention is the world’s smallest programmable robot that can autonomously move through fluid, shrinking the volume of previous designs by some 10,000-fold. The researchers

MILAN — The European Space Agency announced plans to hire approximately 520 new staff members starting in 2026, following decisions approved at ESA’s 342nd Council meeting earlier this month.  The recruitment will result in a net increase of about 400 staff, alongside the replacement of roughly 120 positions due to retirements. The move will bring

Is it possible to spot personality dysfunction from someone’s everyday word use? My colleagues and I have conducted research that suggests you can, and often sooner than you might expect. Whether in a quick text message, a long email, a casual chat with a friend, or a comment online, the words people choose quietly reveal

A newly discovered exoplanet has to take the crown for the weirdest world we’ve ever spotted out there in the Milky Way galaxy. It’s called PSR J2322-2650b, and everything about it is absolutely loony. It’s a hot Jupiter orbiting a millisecond pulsar, stretched into a lemon shape by the star’s gravity. It has carbon vapor

SANTA FE, N.M. — South Korean launch startup Innospace said it will attempt a second launch of its small rocket in the first half of 2026 after its inaugural flight failed shortly after liftoff Dec. 22. The company’s Hanbit-Nano rocket lifted off from the Alcântara Space Center in Brazil at 8:13 p.m. Eastern, carrying eight

Mathematics is a “science which requires a great amount of imagination”, said the 19th-century Russian maths professor Sofya Kovalevskaya – a pioneering figure for women’s equality in this subject. We all have an imagination, so I believe everyone has the ability to enjoy mathematics. It’s not just arithmetic but a magical mixture of logic, reasoning,

A molten lava world cloaked in a thick envelope of vaporized rock could be the strongest evidence we have yet of a rocky exoplanet with an atmosphere beyond our Solar System. The planet TOI-561 b is an ultra-hot super-Earth with what appears to be a global magma ocean beneath a thick atmosphere of volatile chemicals,

It’s one of humanity’s scariest what-ifs – that the technology we develop to make our lives better develops a will of its own. Early reactions to a September preprint describing AI behavior have already speculated that the technology is exhibiting a survival drive. But, while it’s true that several large language models (LLMs) have been

TAMPA, Fla. — An Indian LVM3 rocket launched AST SpaceMobile’s next-generation direct-to-device BlueBird satellite Dec. 23, kicking off a rollout of dozens of spacecraft built around the largest commercial communications antenna ever deployed in low Earth orbit (LEO). The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) largest rocket lifted off at 10:25 p.m. Eastern from the country’s

In new excavations centered around the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula on the grounds of the Tower of London, archaeologists have uncovered more than 20 previously unknown burials. Following a trial pit dug in 2019, this is the first major archaeological excavation at the historic site in three decades and the first ever

A research team led by Caltech may have just discovered the first-ever superkilonova, a cosmic phenomenon in which a star explodes twice in violently different ways. Their analysis of a series of observations that began with a gravitational wave detected earlier this year may have delivered evidence of the first known supernova to be followed

When a massive windstorm in Colorado last Wednesday indirectly disconnected more than a dozen atomic clocks from their system, it threw out the US official time standard. These touchstone atomic clocks are housed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. Last week, hurricane-force winds in the state wrought havoc on

WASHINGTON  — CACI International said on Dec. 22 it is acquiring space technology company ARKA Group in an all-cash transaction valued at $2.6 billion, expanding its footprint in space-based sensing and intelligence systems. CACI, a publicly traded defense and intelligence contractor based in Reston, Virginia, is acquiring ARKA from Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, the private investment

The curious skeleton of a Roman-era individual in Britain, nicknamed the Beachy Head Woman, is not who we thought she was. It turns out this mysterious woman is not the ‘first black Briton’, as some scientists had speculated based on her physical features. A new analysis of her 2,000-year-old DNA, led by scientists at the

For only the second time ever, a collision between two asteroids has been observed around an alien star not too far beyond the Solar System’s borders. That star is Fomalhaut, a mere cosmic baby at just 440 million years old, still surrounded by a disk of debris leftover from its formation. At just 25 light-years

WASHINGTON — New NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said he wants the agency to move faster on key programs such as Artemis but acknowledged he needs time to get up to speed on NASA’s activities. Isaacman, confirmed by the Senate on a 67-30 vote Dec. 17, was sworn in the following day during a private ceremony

A plague that swept through Eurasia for 2,000 years – millennia before the Black Death of the Middle Ages – has only ever been detected in human remains, until now. For decades, it has been unclear how the Bronze Age plague spread so widely, but now we know which animal was a likely carrier. A

For decades, science fiction writers have tried their best to prepare us for eventual contact with aliens. Their efforts are dominated by several recurrent tropes. There’s the invasion by a warlike species, there’s the highly evolved species trying to communicate with our primitive species, there’s the benevolent aliens come to save us from ourselves, and

The Arctic has experienced its hottest year since records began, a US science agency announced Tuesday, as climate change triggers cascading impacts from melting glaciers and sea ice to greening landscapes and disruptions to global weather. Between October 2024 and September 2025, temperatures were 1.60 degrees Celsius above the 1991–2020 mean, the National Oceanic and

WASHINGTON — NASA’s safety advisers are recommending that the agency reconsider its Artemis lunar landing architecture as well as how it handles incidents such as the flawed Starliner test flight. Members of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, or ASAP, held a public meeting Dec. 19 to discuss recommendations for their annual report, to be published

One of the most famous hominin fossils may not be as familiar as we thought. The specimen, affectionately dubbed “Little Foot“, could represent an entirely new species. Discovered in Sterkfontein cave in South Africa, Little Foot is believed to be the most complete skeleton of an ancient human ancestor ever found, but pinning down its

Research conducted by two physicists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US reveals that clocks on Mars tick 477-millionths of a second (or 477 microseconds) faster per day, on average, compared to Earth clocks. Though small, that difference could be critical in situations where time on Earth, the Moon, and

Hydrogen has long been touted as a possible solution to the climate crisis, but it could also be a small part of the problem, a study warned on Wednesday. Advocates of hydrogen hope it can be produced and used on a large scale in transport and heavy industries in the future, providing a clean alternative

WASHINGTON — The White House issued a sweeping executive order on space policy Dec. 18 covering topics from NASA’s exploration plans to space security. The order, “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” includes a call for returning humans to the moon by 2028 and directs development of a space security strategy to address potential threats to American

How is it December already? What happened to 2025? And how did we suddenly jump from eating Easter eggs to putting up Christmas trees? To understand why our perception of time seems to bend and warp, we need to dig into how our brains tell time in the first place. The term “time perception” is

Every now and again, a stellar object is caught zooming across space like a white rabbit, extremely late for a very important date. Now, for the first time, astronomers have confirmed a supermassive black hole at least 10 million times the mass of the Sun, somehow yeeted from its host galaxy at a jaw-dropping 954