SCIENCE
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Trump Wants to go to Mars. That’s Not Happening
In his January inaugural address, President Donald Trump declared that we will “pursue our Manifest Density into the stars” and “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” He reiterated the Mars promise in his March 4 speech to a joint session of Congress. As for a timeline, SpaceX’s founder and CEO Elon Musk, stated in November that he…
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An Unlikely Organ Helps to Explain Sherpas’ Aptitude for Altitude
An Unlikely Organ Helps to Explain Sherpas’ Aptitude for Altitude New work reveals a surprising hero in combating altitude sickness By Sasha Warren edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Solovyova/iStock/Getty Images Plus For most mountaineers, some level of altitude sickness is inevitable. But Indigenous highlanders living on the Tibetan Plateau, known as Sherpas, have inhabited the high Himalaya long enough to…
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These Dogs Can Sniff Out Invasive Species before It’s Too Late
These Dogs Can Sniff Out Invasive Species before It’s Too Late Dogs excel at finding spotted lanternfly eggs in lower-level infestations By Gennaro Tomma edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier One of the dogs trained to track down spotted lanternflies. From sniffing out rare species to tracking down poachers, dogs aid conservation efforts in a surprising variety of ways. And a…
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How COVID Shaped Education and Mental Health Outcomes for Kids
As COVID surged and schools across the U.S. shuttered in March 2020, Jamie Wyss, an elementary school counselor at the Virginia Beach City Public Schools system in Virginia, vividly remembers quickly assembling paper packets on social-emotional learning to hand out to parents. She initially thought students and staff would return in a week, maybe two. But neither parents nor students…
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Earth’s Oldest Impact Crater Discovered in Australia
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. We have discovered the oldest meteorite impact crater on Earth, in the very heart of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The crater formed more than 3.5 billion years ago, making it the oldest known by more than a billion years. Our discovery…
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How Ants May Save You from Future Traffic Jams
How Ants May Save You from Future Traffic Jams Ants’ tactics to avoid traffic jams could be applied to future self-driving cars By Allison Parshall edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Fabio Di Biase/Getty Images From an airplane, cars crawling down the highway look like ants. But actual ants—unlike cars—somehow manage to avoid the scourge of stop-and-go traffic. Researchers are now…
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Blue Ghost, a Private U.S. Spacecraft, Successfully Lands on the Moon
Blue Ghost, a Private U.S. Spacecraft, Lands on the Moon After its successful lunar touchdown, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost mission could soon be joined on the moon by two more commercial spacecraft By Lee Billings edited by Dean Visser An artist’s impression of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander on the lunar surface. Blue Ghost, a NASA-funded lunar lander…
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Crab Memes Amplify Mistaken Ideas about Evolution
February 27, 2025 4 min read Crab Memes Amplify Mistaken Ideas about Evolution Memes about repeated evolution of crabs have been co-opted to joke about technology and “ultimate forms.” They’re hilarious, but they oversimplify natural variation, giving bad arguments a scientific veneer By Joanna Wolfe edited by Dan Vergano Lee Foong Lee/Alamy Stock Photo You’ve seen the memes—“everything will eventually…
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Why It’s Important to Talk about Race with Children
When my son was three years old, he told me one day after preschool that he didn’t want to play with me because I was Black. He went on; Black people are mean, he said, and he only wanted to play with his dad because my husband was white, like him. We were shocked and I was hurt—my child thought…
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Feeling Overwhelmed by the News? Here’s How to Protect Your Mental Health
It’s February 2025. The world feels like complete chaos, and it’s hard to step away from the news. Maybe your body feels tight, and perhaps your mind is racing. Take a deep breath, then keep reading. It isn’t just you: lots of people have expressed that they have felt overwhelmed and burned out from the events of recent months. Disasters,…
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