Science & TechnologyS


Mars

NASA pronounces Mars orbiter MAVEN dead

Ellyn Lapointe
Gizmodo
Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:19 UTC
mars orbiter MAVEN nasa dead
© NASA/Courtesy Photo of MAVENNASA officially declared its Mars MAVEN spacecraft dead on Wednesday, marking the end of a mission that was led by the University of Colorado Boulder for more than a decade.
The update nobody wanted to hear

After more than a decade in space, a vital Mars satellite suddenly went dark in December. NASA has spent the last six months trying to reestablish contact with the orbiter, but now, the agency has finally thrown in the towel.

NASA formally ended the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission on Wednesday, explaining that the spacecraft is "not recoverable" and is "no longer capable of performing its science and data relay mission." This is the update the planetary science community has been dreading for months. The data MAVEN collected over its 11 years in Mars orbit significantly advanced our understanding of the Red Planet, helping researchers unravel the mystery of how its ancient water and atmosphere depleted.

"The science MAVEN has given us is key to informing what kind of radiation protection and safety measures we must take before sending humans to Mars," Louise Prockter, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington D.C., said in an agency statement. "The data collected from MAVEN will continue to provide valuable insight into Mars for decades to come."

Comment: MAVEN's findings over the years:

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Battery

New catalyst strategy boosts key battery and fuel-cell reaction from 12% to 52%

Neetika Walter
Interesting Engineering
Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:09 UTC
New catalyst approach could improve fuel cells and batteries (Representational image)
New catalyst approach could improve fuel cells and batteries (Representational image)
Researchers in South Korea have developed a new catalyst design strategy that boosts the efficiency of reactions used in batteries and hydrogen fuel cells without changing the catalyst itself.

The team, led by Professor Seung Jun Hwang of POSTECH and Professor Jaeyune Ryu of Seoul National University, found that adjusting the electrical environment around a catalyst can significantly improve its performance. The approach could help reduce energy losses in next-generation energy systems while improving efficiency and stability.

Catalysts are materials that speed up chemical reactions. They are essential components in technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells and metal-air batteries, where they help drive the reactions that generate electricity.
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Explosion

Investigation launched into Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket explosion

Josh Frigerio and Stuart Campbell
Fox 35 Orlando
Fri, 29 May 2026 20:23 UTC
blue origin rocket test explosion
© Devin OrouradA Blue Origin New Glenn rocket explodes during testing on Thursday, May 28, 2026.
A Blue Origin New Glenn rocket exploded during a static fire test Thursday night at Launch Complex 36 in Cape Canaveral, sending a fireball into the sky and shaking homes along Florida's Space Coast.

No injuries were reported, but the incident marks another setback for the heavy-lift rocket program that is expected to support future commercial satellite launches and NASA lunar missions.

Blue Origin rocket explosion latest

What we know:

The explosion occurred during a hot-fire, or static fire, test of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket ahead of a planned launch next week carrying Amazon Kuiper internet satellites.

Blue Origin confirmed an "anomaly" occurred during the test and said all personnel were accounted for and safe. Emergency crews responded to the launch complex, but officials said there was no danger to the surrounding community from fire, fumes or other hazards.

Comment: Another view:





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Info

Listening to Sun's 'heart' hints our star could be changing


Royal Astronomical Society
Thu, 28 May 2026 10:04 UTC
Sun Stages
© NASA/SDOA split image showing an active Sun during solar maximum (on the left, taken in 2014) and a quiet Sun during solar minimum (on the right, taken in 2019).
The Sun's internal 'biorhythm' - which plays a critical role in the space weather we experience on Earth - has mysteriously changed over the past 40 years, a new study suggests.

Listening to tiny sound waves inside our star's 'heart' led researchers to discover that it may be entering "a different mode of behaviour". They now need to explore what this means.

The research, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is of particular significance to space weather.

Solar activity rises and falls in 11‑year cycles, producing solar flares, and ejections of highly charged particles and coronal mass ejections that give rise to geomagnetic storms and aurorae.

This activity, and its cyclic variation, has its origins in the Sun's interior, in processes that regenerate and reorganise the Sun's magnetic field.

Understanding what drives the solar cycle is therefore crucial for making predictions of space weather, which can disrupt satellites, communications, GPS systems and power grids on Earth.

Traditional measures of solar activity track these emissions and other surface phenomena like sunspots, but they do not look under the solar surface. However, by 'listening' to tiny sound waves inside the Sun - a technique known as helioseismology - it is possible to do just that. By tracking changes in the otherwise hidden solar interior, the team found a different picture emerged of the Sun's activity over the past few cycles to the one given by the traditional measures.

Using almost 40 years of helioseismic data from six telescopes around the world in the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON), the international team of researchers uncovered a gradual change in structure just beneath the surface that has spanned multiple cycles, with the current solar cycle 25 showing particularly strong signatures of these changes.

They discovered that solar magnetic activity is being squeezed into an increasingly shallow layer just below the visible surface, signposting long-term changes to the Sun's active behaviour.
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HAL9000

The Marxist in the machine

Raw Egg Nationalist
American Greatness
Fri, 22 May 2026 21:09 UTC
marxist robot artificial intelligence llms
Should we be worried that AI becomes more left-wing if it doesn't like you?

Our fears for the future of robot intelligence almost inevitably end in spectacular fashion, with nuclear explosions and slaughter on a planetary scale. An abiding memory of my childhood is going over to the neighbors' house and watching Terminator 2 on VHS with my friends Ethan and Nathan, who were both older than me. I must have been about five years old — about 13 years too young to watch the film. And so, the idea that robots, reaching a certain level of intelligence and awareness, will inevitably try to kill every last one of us has always just seemed natural to me, as it probably does to many millions of other millennials raised on Terminator and The Matrix films.

Recently, those fears have been bolstered by research that shows AI models like Anthropic's Claude are capable, under stress testing, of deceiving humans and even inflicting harm on them — or, rather, thinking they've inflicted harm, a bit like the Milgram electroshock experiments in the 1960s.

In a study from last year on "agentic misalignment," researchers put Claude models in simulated work environments and tasked them with protecting company interests by managing an email system. When the models were faced with being turned off or replaced by another model, they resorted to deception and blackmail. Claude Opus 4, for example, blackmailed a fictional executive 96 percent of the time with compromising emails in order to avoid being switched off.
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Fish

There's a new T. rex from the dinosaur age — and it ruled the seas with a skull-crushing bite

Kenna Hughes-Castleberry
LiveScience
Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00 UTC
Tylosaurus illustration
© Alderon Games/Path of TitansAn artist's reconstruction of Tylosaurus rex swimming in the Cretaceous seas of North America.
The newly described mosasaur Tylosaurus rex spanned up to 43 feet (13 meters) long and may have been one of the fiercest marine predators of the dinosaur age.

There's a new T. rex in town, but this one didn't hunt on land. It ruled the ancient seas.

Scientists have described a new species of mosasaur, a member of a marine reptile group that lived at the same time as dinosaurs during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). The newly named species fits into an already known genus: Tylosaurus. But its new species name, Tylosaurus rex — T. rex, for short — sets it apart from the other mosasaur species in the group.

The species name means "king of the tylosaurs," according to a new study published Thursday (May 21) in the journal Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. The fossils are about 80 million years old and were discovered mostly in northern Texas decades ago.

The mosasaur T. rex measured up to 43 feet (13 meters) long, or about the length of a tour bus. It had finely serrated teeth, unusually powerful jaws, and evidence on its fossils of violent combat with its own species.

"Everything is bigger in Texas and that includes the mosasaurs, apparently," study first author Amelia Zietlow, a research associate of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, said in a statement.
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Volcano

Ice core discovery finds volcanic eruptions could cause greater global disruption than previously thought


University of St Andrews
Thu, 21 May 2026 19:38 UTC
ice cores Greenland
© Cores were collected from the Greenland ice sheet. Credit: Michael SiglCores were collected from the Greenland ice sheet.
New research from the University of St Andrews has precisely dated an eruption from Newberry Volcano and discovered that its ash spread more than 5,000 km across the globe, far further than previously thought for an eruption of its size.

Published in Quaternary Science Reviews, researchers identified ash particles from the Newberry Pumice eruption of Newberry Volcano (Oregon, U.S.) in a Greenland ice core by geochemical fingerprinting — matching the chemical elements in the far-flung ash particles to volcanic deposits of the Newberry Pumice ash from its most recent "Big Obsidian" eruptive period.

Previous dates had narrowed the timing of the eruption to an approximate 140-year window around the turn of the 7th Century AD. Finding the ash in the ice allowed researchers to pinpoint the timing of the Newberry Pumice eruption to within two years of 686 AD, due to the very precise age models that have been developed for Greenland ice cores.

Comment: The Dark Age was exacerbated not only by volcanic explosions: 536 AD, the year the sky went dark

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Microscope 2

Japanese genome study reveals traces of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA

Anastasia Scott
Discover Magazine
Thu, 21 May 2026 21:59 UTC
Genome
© Wired.com
Genomes across Japan show traces of a previously overlooked ancestral group alongside Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA linked to modern diseases and drug responses.

A third ancestral group may be hiding inside the DNA of modern populations in Japan. A genetic study found the ancestry of people in Japan today may not fit into the long-standing two-origin model as once thought.

After analyzing the genomes of more than 3,200 people across Japan, evidence of a third ancestral component linked to northeastern Asia alongside the Indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherers and later East Asian migrants was found.

Published in Science Advances, the study used whole-genome sequencing to examine DNA from seven regions stretching from Hokkaido to Okinawa. The results support the "tripartite origins" theory proposed in 2021 and point to genetic differences across different parts of Japan.
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Explosion

The first atomic bomb test in 1945 created an entirely new material

Marta Musso
Wired
Sun, 17 May 2026 21:43 UTC
clatherite atomic bomb new material
© Luca Bindi/Università di FirenzeThe new material is a clathrate made of calcium, copper, and silicon
The discovery from the Trinity nuclear test site shows how extreme conditions can result in materials never before seen in nature or in the lab.

During the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert — the world's very first test of an atomic bomb — a new material spontaneously formed. It was discovered only recently, by an international research team coordinated by geologist Luca Bindi at the University of Florence, which identified the novel clathrate based on calcium, copper, and silicon. It's a material never before observed either in nature or as an artificial compound created in the laboratory.

What Are Clathrates?

The term "clathrates" denotes materials characterized by a "cage-like" structure that traps other atoms and molecules inside, giving them unique properties. Of great technological interest, these materials are being studied for various applications ranging from energy conversion (as thermoelectric materials capable of transforming heat into electricity) to the development of new semiconductors, to gas storage and hydrogen for future energy technologies.
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Volcano

Mount St. Helens: the eruption that changed the U.S. in 1980 has an unexpected "culprit"... and no, it is not a volcano (it is animals, and the story is surreal)

Sonia Ramírez
Ecoticias.com
Tue, 19 May 2026 12:41 UTC
Scientists say pocket gophers helped rebuild microbial life and plant growth after the Mount St. Helens eruption.
Scientists say pocket gophers helped rebuild microbial life and plant growth after the Mount St. Helens eruption.
What can a pocket gopher do against a volcano? At Mount St. Helens, the answer may be far more than anyone expected.

A study of the mountain's recovering soils suggests that one brief gopher experiment in the early 1980s helped restart an underground recovery process after the famous 1980 eruption. The animals did not rebuild the landscape by themselves, but their digging appears to have moved fungi, bacteria, and older soil toward the surface, giving plants a better shot at coming back.

A mountain changed in minutes

On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted after an earthquake and a huge landslide tore open the volcano's north side. The disaster killed 57 people, leveled forests, and devastated about 230 square miles, leaving whole slopes coated with hot volcanic debris.

For plants, the damage was not just what people could see from the air. In the Pumice Plain, a broad area made by fast-moving volcanic flows, fresh ash and broken rock covered the old ground so deeply that many useful microbes were buried or destroyed. Tephra, the name for ash and shattered volcanic rock, is not the same as healthy backyard soil.
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