Ars Technica Science

President Donald Trump released a budget blueprint on Friday calling for a 23 percent cut to NASA's budget, two days after the agency launched four astronauts on the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years. The spending proposal for fiscal year 2027 is the opening salvo in a multi-month budget process. Both houses of Congress must pass their own appropriations bills, reconcile any differences between the two, and then send the final budget to the White House for President Trump's signat

Native Americans have been playing with dice in games of chance for more than 12,000 years, according to a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity. And the oldest examples of Native American dice predate the earliest currently known dice in the Old World by millennia. “Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations,” said author Robert Madden, a graduate student at Colorado State University. “What the archaeological record shows is that ancient

When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine. Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which

Octopuses are one of the most alien creatures on Earth. The lack of bones makes them amazing shapeshifters, most of them can change color like chameleons, and they pump blue copper-based blood through their bodies using three distinct hearts. They rely on a decentralized nervous system, where two-thirds of their neurons reside in their arms, allowing each limb to independently taste, touch, and make decisions for itself. Now, a team of scientists led by Pablo S. Villar, a molecular biologist at

The details of how animal life began are a bit murky. Most of the groups familiar today are present in the Cambrian, a period when they rapidly diversified, with familiar features evolving alongside bizarre creatures with no obvious modern equivalents. There are hints that some forms of present animal life predated the Cambrian. But most of the organisms we've found in Ediacaran deposits have no obvious relationship to anything we're familiar with. The complete absence of these creatures in late

On Wednesday, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) released its numbers on what was built in 2025. And much as we saw in the US, solar power is the primary driver of change. The numbers show that the world installed an average of 1.4 gigawatts of solar capacity every day last year, for a total of 511 GW. That brings the total solar capacity up to 2.4 Terawatts, making it the largest single source of renewable capacity by far, at more than a Terawatt above either wind or hydro. Obvio

Many of the early exoplanet discoveries were exciting on their own, confirming that there really were strange new worlds out in the Universe. But over time, our focus has shifted more toward numbers, as we began using the frequency of objects like super-Earths and mini-Neptunes to learn more about how planets form. With four gravitational wave detectors now having generated years of data, we may be on the verge of seeing something similar happen with black hole mergers. On Wednesday, researchers

In 2023, the Swedish government announced that the country’s schools would be going back to basics, emphasizing skills such as reading and writing, particularly in early grades. After mostly being sidelined, physical books are now being reintroduced into classrooms, and students are learning to write the old-fashioned way: by hand, with a pencil or pen, on sheets of paper. The Swedish government also plans to make schools cellphone-free throughout the country. Educational authorities have been i

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Launching to the Moon is an all-day undertaking, something the four astronauts waiting to climb aboard NASA's Artemis II rocket know well. "It is actually a very long day," said Victor Glover, the pilot on Artemis II. "We wake up about eight hours before launch, and there's a pretty tight schedule of things to get out there." Glover and his three crewmates have their schedules planned to the minute throughout the nine-day Artemis II mission. If all goes according to

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The US military has always been part of NASA's human spaceflight program. The first astronauts were nearly all military pilots, and two of the four crew members set to fly around the Moon on NASA's Artemis II mission were Navy test pilots before joining the astronaut corps. Artemis II, the first crew mission to the Moon's vicinity since 1972, is set for launch Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover, both Navy t

Three-hundred million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic era were buzzing with giant insects. Meganeuropsis permiana, a predatory insect resembling a modern-day dragonfly, had a wingspan of over 70 centimeters and weighed 100 grams. Biologists looked at these ancient behemoths and asked why bugs aren’t this big anymore. Thirty years ago, they came up with an answer known as the "oxygen constrain hypothesis." For decades, we thought that any dragonflies the size of hawks needed highly ox

Over a decade ago, when I was first starting to pretend I could write about quantum mechanics, I covered a truly bizarre experiment. One half of a pair of entangled photons was sent through a device it could navigate as either a particle or a wave. After it was clear of the device, the other half of the pair was measured in a way that forced the first to act as one or the other. Once that was done, the first invariably behaved as if it were whatever the measurement made it into the whole time. I

Our oceans are full of sophisticated, perfect traps: Nets, hooks, fishing lines. Designed to capture animals destined for our dinner tables, they often catch other wildlife too. This accidental harvest is known as bycatch, and every year it causes the death of millions of marine animals, including whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, and seabirds. Nets and gear can asphyxiate animals or cause fatal injuries; even when the animals are tossed back to sea, they frequently die. Bycatch is also a dilem

Welcome to Edition 8.35 of the Rocket Report! The headlines this week are again dominated by the big changes afoot in NASA's exploration program, with the announcement of a Moon base and a nuclear-powered rocket to Mars. The shakeups come as the agency is just a week away from launching Artemis II, a circumlunar flight carrying a crew of four around the Moon. The Ars space team will be writing extensively about this mission in the days ahead, and we may skip the Rocket Report next week to focus

Recent repairs to a centuries-old tile floor at a church in the Netherlands may have revealed the skeleton of the French Musketeer d’Artagnan. Today, Charles de Batz de Castlemore, Count d'Artagnan, is best known as a character in The Three Musketeers, written by Alexandre Dumas and eventually played by both Gene Kelly and future Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—but he was a real French military officer and spy. D’Artagnan died during a siege, and the whereabouts of his body have remained

Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer. Where I live in Boise, Idaho, temperatures hit the low 80s Fahrenheit (high-20s Celsius) in mid-March. The same heat dome sent temperatures soaring to 105° F (40° C) in Phoenix. Ordinarily, water managers and hydrologists like me who study the Western US expec

NASA's announcement Tuesday that it will "pause" work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration's space policy. But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the Gateway program's official start in 2019. There are pieces of the station undergoing construction a

PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is generally not a high-profile group. It tends to be noticed when things go wrong, such as when the PCAST head named by Biden had to resign due to abusive behavior. Biden, who was generally supportive of science, didn't even name the members of PCAST until eight months after his inauguration. So it's no surprise that an administration that's been hostile to science took even longer to staff its version of the group. The list

Bourbon is a multi-billion-dollar market, but the American barrel-aged whiskey also produces a lot of wasted grain at distilleries. Chemists at the University of Kentucky developed a method to transform that stillage into electrodes and used those electrodes to build supercapacitors with energy storage capacity on par with existing commercial devices. They presented their work at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in  Atlanta, Georgia. US distillers began making bourbon in the 18th centu

Roughly a year ago, Spain and Portugal went dark when the electrical grid of the entire Iberian Peninsula failed. While the grid operators did a heroic job of restarting the grid quickly, there were obvious questions about what had led to the blackout in the first place. A preliminary report suggested that a combination of grid-level voltage oscillations and early disconnections was the main factor. Over the weekend, the European grid coordinator, ENTSO-e, released its final, detailed report on