Ars Technica Science

About 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid smashed into Earth, kicking up tsunamis and dropping hot debris that annihilated non-avian dinosaurs and many other species. But not everything it left in its wake was destructive. This space rock hit what is now the partially submerged Yucatan Peninsula, and at the bottom of the ocean, the impact generated enough heat to create a hydrothermal system that persisted for 8 million years and may have been a hotbed of life. When researchers drilled

Most implants like pacemakers and insulin pumps work in isolation. To help them coordinate with each other, a team of Georgia Tech researchers built a networking system that sends signals through body tissue instead of antennas and radio waves. Radio problems Implants that communicate today mostly rely on radio protocols like Bluetooth Low Energy or near-field communication (NFC). Both are a poor fit for in-body data transfer, says Alex Abramson, a Georgia Tech engineer and co-author of the new

AI-based tools seem to be causing security threats on a nearly daily basis, in part because we've been slow to recognize potential threats. One area where we seem to be ahead of the game, however, is in biosecurity. As with most things biological, utility goes hand in hand with threats. We've developed increasingly sophisticated tools for designing proteins and seen some major successes, such as AI-designed enzymes that can digest plastics or block venom proteins. But these same tools could be u

Old-fashioned striped barbershop poles turn in place on a vertical axis, but humans typically perceive the stripes moving upward rather than turning with the pole. It's a well-known visual illusion arising from processing biases in human vision. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, a similar effect could explain how butterflies often evade predatory birds: Their flight patterns and wing patterns combine to make it hard for predators to accurately gauge speed and direction. "

Back in the 1930s, scientists noticed that water fleas and rats fed restricted diets while young went on to live longer. The same effect has since turned up in fruit flies and mice. What we did not know was how a meal eaten in infancy could affect health weeks, months, or even years later. A recent Nature study might have found the answer. A team led by Fumiaki Obata, a biologist at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Kobe, Japan, found a protein that carries a record into adult

Equipment to capture carbon dioxide from ambient air or smokestacks generally works through a sort of reversible filter. Air is passed through granules or a liquid that absorbs the CO2, then that CO2-loaded substance undergoes a process (usually heating) that causes it to let go of all that CO2. The resulting gas can be collected in a separated stream. It’s also possible to do a similar sort of operation on a smaller scale—like inside a battery. A new study from a team led by James Buchen of the

The infamous Carrington Event of 1859 has long been considered the first extreme space weather event, but there have been reports of minor disturbances to telegraph equipment during geomagnetic storms since the late 1840s. In 2013, scholars discovered an anonymous report published in 1871 in Nature describing how a "very intense magnetic disturbance" disrupted rail travel in Exeter on the southern coast of England in October 1841. If accurate, this would be the earliest such account. However, ac

Normally, we try to update you quarterly on what's going on with the US electric grid since it provides a nice view of developing trends and smooths out some month-to-month randomness. Unfortunately, I was out of the office when last month's data was released, so this will be a seven-month update on 2026 trends. The top line item is that energy use is continuing to rise, albeit not as quickly as headlines about data centers might lead people to believe. Beyond data centers, there's a growing ele

The first in a new class of space telescopes is on track to reach the launch pad in the early 2030s, NASA announced this week. The PRIMA mission will be the first of NASA's Probe Explorers, a new line of observatories intended to do more science for less money. The agency's space telescopes typically fall into lower-cost "Explorer-class" missions, with cost caps in the range of a few hundred million dollars, or flagship observatories like the recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope,

Late last week, we started seeing headlines about how new research was suggesting we might have two brains instead of the one that seems to show up on MRI scans. As is so often the case, these rumors can be traced back to a single press release put out by one of the universities where the work was done. You do not have two brains. It's a silly way to look at the results of the new paper. But there are far better ways to look at the results, ways that can help us understand how the brain gets put

On Friday, The Washington Post reported on a contentious White House meeting in which the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, tried to fend off yet another effort to place funding decisions under political control. The move came from Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has sought to limit and control research funds. The Post suggested that Bhattacharya ended up on the losing side of the fight. This initial leak has been conf

For most of the last century, T. rex was pictured as a sluggish, tail-dragging reptile that had to warm up in the sun before it could go anywhere. Then, further research changed that view, replacing it with the active, bird-like animal shown in the movie Jurassic Park. But whether T. rex used warm blood to power that activity remained a question. Now we might have gotten closer to an answer. A team of researchers led by Randon J. Flores and Robert A. Eagle, geochemists at the University of Calif

Learning another language is a highly complex mental activity. It requires people to remember words, distinguish unfamiliar sounds, recognize patterns, work out grammatical rules, and retrieve the right expression at the right moment. All of this happens while listening, interpreting, and preparing a response. Could all this mental activity also help keep an aging brain healthier? Research suggests it can. Concerns about memory and dementia can send aging adults looking for ways to exercise thei

For decades, astronomers thought rings were something only giant planets had. That changed in 2013, when a small, dark body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus passed in front of a star and blinked twice on either side of the main event, revealing two narrow rings around an object barely 250 kilometers across. “It was a surprise,” says Pablo Santos-Sanz, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain. Ever since, the question has been what such rings are made of and

For a long time, sleep research has treated the cerebral cortex as a passive follower reacting to signals from the deep brain. “Usually, sleep is associated with being controlled by subcortical regions,” said Geoffrey Terral, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The cortex is where the slow rhythms of deep sleep can be seen, but researchers assumed the signals that triggered them originated elsewhere. In a recent Nature study, Terral and Renata Batista-Brito,

Abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia, a genetic disorder affecting respiratory function. Credit: Ning Xu, Tsinghua University Abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia, a genetic disorder affecting respiratory function. Credit: Ning Xu, Tsinghua University A Chinese optical engineer is the winner of this year's Small World in Motion competition, sponsored

Days after finalizing a rule that would eliminate climate rules for power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was sued by groups who say the EPA’s repeal was shockingly short-sighted and risked leaving the country’s single largest source of industrial climate pollution unchecked. On Thursday, the American Lung Association, the American Public Health Association (APHA), the Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council

Staff at the Lady Elliott Island Eco Resort off the southern Great Barrier Reef in Australia are well acquainted with the shenanigans of a male bottlenose dolphin they've nicknamed Bubbles. Bubbles has been around since at least 2017 and regularly harasses local bigeye trevally, chasing a fish around and stressing it so much that the fish throws up what it has consumed. Bubbles then devours the regurgitated food. The dolphin's unusual behavior is the focus of a new paper published in the journal

The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack. “We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect several weeks of partial downtime as we transition to new infrastructure and services.” “I am very sa

In recent years, there has been a lot of excitement about the potential for studying human diseases in what are called "organoids." These small patches of tissue, formed using stem cells, appear to produce many of the same cell types and at least some of the structures normally formed in actual organs, and thus can provide a better model for diseases that rely on the sometimes complex interactions among multiple specialized cell types that are a feature of the human body. But even the most sophi