About 1671, parson Symonds, who officiated at Garsdon church in north Wiltshire in south west England, was riding home late one night when a specter leapt up behind him. The specter rode parallel to him until they came to the parsonage, where it jumped off. The apparition then turned to face Symonds, and “gap’d at him”. Symonds identified the ghost as that of John Estcourt, a gentleman who had died about two years earlier.
Halloween is all about witches and ghosts. In English scientific circles in the second half of the 17th century, there was a discussion about whether such things existed and how their existence could be proved.
On Episode 233 of This Week In Space, Tariq Malik and guest host Rick Jenet are joined by Dr. Amanda Smith-Hackler, the Director of Education for the Universities Space Research Association and Principal Investigator for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Scholars and STEM Workforce Development Programs, about the new and exciting opportunities available to young people seeking to enter the space workforce.
On October 24, 1946, a V-2 rocket captured the first-ever photo of Earth from space.
While these grainy, black-and-white images might not look like much today, they were a huge deal at the time, because no one had ever seen Earth from space before.
It didn’t take long for fans to figure out that the fourth season of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" was going to be unlike any season of "Star Trek" before it. The entire season was one giant gimmick, and that gimmick was shoving "Trek" into as many genres as possible and often directly adapting classic films from those genres.
Scientists have voted to change how the world keeps time, but most people won't even notice. NPR's Scott Simon talks to Philippe Richard, director of Switzerland's Federal Institute of Metrology.
Samples collected from asteroid Bennu by NASA are revealing surprising new details about how our Solar System formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. A new chemical analysis challenges earlier theories about the asteroid's birthplace and suggests that Jupiter played an important role in shaping the materials from which Bennu and other ancient objects formed.
Bennu completes one orbit around the Sun every 1.2 years and makes a relatively close approach to Earth about every six years, coming within roughly 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles). NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission traveled to the asteroid, collected material from its surface, and successfully delivered the samples to Earth in 2023.
Astronomers have seen things you wouldn’t believe. Diaphanous auroras on other planets. Collapsing stars off the belt of Orion. The fringes of black holes seemingly on fire. But nothing has ever compared to the almighty force of what one astrophysicist calls “the energy monsters of the universe.”
Every now and then, observatories catch strange flashes lighting up the far-flung reaches of the cosmos. These cataclysmic explosions spray intense radiation and beams of energy through the universe at close to the speed of light. After the initial blast, which spews out gamma rays, a storm of radiation pours into the surrounding galaxy, creating a ferocious afterglow that burns in every part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Uranium enrichment is a contentious topic these days. This process of purifying uranium to increase the concentration of the isotope uranium-235 is important for nuclear power plants, but it is also crucial for building nuclear weapons.
The ongoing war in Iran has centered on nuclear issues, including enrichment—Iranian officials have resisted any peace-deal terms that restrict the country’s enrichment program. And a proposed agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia would break with precedent by allowing enrichment in that country for the first time—worrying nuclear nonproliferation advocates.
The spooky season is officially here! To celebrate, we've put together a list of five Halloween-themed skywatching targets that you can enjoy with nothing but the naked eye or binoculars and, of course, clear skies.
Over millennia, the night sky has helped shape human beliefs. In return, we have imprinted our myths, stories and perceptions upon it, seeing monsters and mythology in the twinkling lights of the stars and assigning sinister aspects to innocent cosmic objects.
Many of these ghostly impressions and meanings have survived to the present day. Here are a few of our favorites.
If you were approaching the edge of a spiral galaxy, arriving from afar through the cosmos, it might look something like this.
In this new snapshot by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), we can see the edge of the spiral galaxy NGC 1827. Found about 37 million light-years from Earth, this galaxy sparkles in this side-on view.
“My favorite number is 2 ... 2 is kind of responsible for the concept of whether things are even or odd.” —Melanie Matchett Wood, American mathematician
Two—the first even number, prime, balancing two ones like weights on a meter stick rocking on a fulcrum. We balance on two feet, and if we wobble we can stretch out our two arms on two sides and focus on a point with our two eyes.
Information gobbled sorting itself like black and white marble tiles in the foyer
“How can trees survive in an urban environment? The human artifacts we call cities first appeared less than 10,000 years ago. The ancestors of today’s trees are some 20,000 times older than the oldest cities. As trees have been exposed to more than 100 million years of selective pressure to adapt to natural environments, it borders on the biologically miraculous that any tree can occupy an environmental niche as hostile as a city street.
The best stargazing apps can take your observation of the night sky to the next level, whether that's using augmented reality (AR mode) to identify stars or looking up the next lunar eclipse.
However, the bright light emitted by smartphone screens can prevent your eyes from adjusting to the dark. If you're using one of the best telescopes, you'll want to preserve your night vision even more. Fortunately, there are ways to all but eliminate this problem.
Laura Harrison didn’t want to evacuate. The neuroscientist and mother of two had finally gotten her young children settled into bed after their nighttime ritual. But it was the evening of January 7, 2025, and the skies over her home in Sierra Madre, Calif., glowed a haunting orange-gray. Outside, the Santa Ana winds sent debris swirling with powerful gusts.
Scientists have uncovered a surprisingly complex network of magnetic structures hidden above regions of the Sun that appear relatively calm. Using the Sunrise-III solar observatory, which traveled high into Earth's stratosphere aboard a balloon in 2024, an international research team led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) discovered intricate, thread-like magnetic features that had previously been difficult to observe.
The findings reveal that even the Sun's seemingly quiet regions contain elaborate magnetic structures. They also offer new clues to how energy travels upward through the solar atmosphere and contributes to its heating.
A Hidden Web of Magnetic Threads Above the Sun
On a humid morning in June, Ramadan Elmoudi nervously watched grid current flow into a machine his colleagues had spent years building and kept his expectations low. Years earlier, a similar test by another group of researchers left their machine smoking, two days in a row. This time nothing burned. “I was stunned,” says Elmoudi, a senior research engineer at the New York Power Authority.
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Efforts to understand how classic psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD summon powerful changes in consciousness tend to focus on what's happening inside our head.
A new Albuquerque mixed-use neighborhood called Mesa del Sol, near the airport, is still under construction. But it’s coming together: earth-toned homes have popped up; rock-based snake sculptures line the medians. There’s also a road called Pacific Fusion Drive—and it now leads toward a construction site where a company of the same name broke ground on a $1-billion fusion research and manufacturing campus on a hot, dusty August day.
Scientists have measured the amount of helium produced during the Universe's first five minutes with unprecedented precision, offering a clearer picture of the conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang. The achievement, made by an international research team that includes scientists from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, represents a major advance in precision cosmology.
The findings, presented in five papers published in The Astrophysical Journal, are based on 130 hours of observations using the Large Binocular Telescope. By analyzing distant galaxies, the researchers reduced the uncertainty in this fundamental measurement to just 0.5%, making it three times more precise than previous estimates.
Two opposing ideas can be true at once. Something can be helpful and harmful, good and bad, annoying and endearing. That’s the premise of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), and it’s also, I think, partly why we are having such a tough time navigating social media. We genuinely benefit from the “infinite scroll of doom.” We are social beings, and our very survival has always depended on connections. A lone human ancestor would have been easy pickings for a hyena on the African savanna, and without cooperative hunting or food gathering, our forebears simply wouldn’t have made it. Even today human infants are helpless without at least one connection. We’re built for bonding, so much so that the brain rewards us for it, releasing bonding chemicals such as oxytocin when we connect. Maybe, then, it’s no wonder we are drawn to social media platforms, where connections can be forged in minutes.
In 2022, when Tom was 32, he went to extreme lengths to defeat his tech addiction. He flew from his home in Michigan to a town outside Stockholm and gave up his devices for a three-month, self-directed “dopamine detox.” He did cold plunges, worked out and hiked—all without looking at his phone.
The space around Earth is turning into a junkyard. Researchers think a refundable deposit scheme could force satellite operators to clean up their act before a tipping point is reached.
An updated hurricane forecast map is making it easier for people to identify areas threatened by storms, but new research reveals a concerning limitation. Even when people can recognize where hurricane watches are in effect, they may not feel more at risk or become more inclined to take precautions.
As Grace Griffin and her husband were welcoming their long-awaited baby — a daughter — Griffin found herself worried about looming medical bills and unsure whether the family could pay for the care needed.
"This whole experience has me wondering (keeping me up at night, actually): Can we ever afford to have another child?"
— Grace Griffin, Calumet, Michigan
On a drizzly morning in March 2025, a bright blue dive boat motored through Halifax Harbor in Nova Scotia toward the Tufts Cove generating station. The boat rumbled past the power plant’s three smokestacks, striped red and white like candy canes, to a yellow buoy bobbing in the waves.
SpaceX just launched its mysterious "Starfall" return capsule for the second time ever.
Starfall was one of 32 payloads on the company's Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission, which launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket at 7:04 a.m. EDT (1104 GMT) today (Oct. 20) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
SpaceX has been relatively quiet about Starfall, which debuted this past June on a Falcon 9 launch from the Cape.
That June 23 flight was a dedicated demonstration mission for Starfall, designed to show that the capsule can fly in a controlled fashion and survive the harrowing downward trip through Earth's atmosphere.
As diseases go, type 2 diabetes and epilepsy seem to have little in common. One is a metabolic disorder involving high blood glucose and failing insulin, the other a matter of neurons and electrical pulses. So it is odd that both often respond to fasting. Likewise, depression, obesity, Alzheimer’s, heart disease—all are wildly different diseases, yet all are influenced by diet. This shared vulnerability points to metabolism—the way we harvest energy from the food we eat and use it to power our cells.
On Sept. 30, NASA formally concluded OSIRIS-REx, the historic first U.S. mission to pluck a pristine piece of an asteroid and deliver it safely back to Earth.
Some galaxies glow with sweeping spiral arms, while others are shaped by violent collisions, powerful black holes, and explosive bursts of star formation. A newly released collection of 16 images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes reveals the extraordinary diversity of these cosmic structures.
NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission encountered an unexpected mystery when it arrived at asteroid Bennu in 2018. Instead of the relatively smooth terrain that earlier observations had suggested, the spacecraft found a rugged landscape dominated by enormous boulders, with very few areas suitable for collecting samples.
I am excited to announce Chain Theory, a new research program of mine that seeks to rebuild fundamental physics from quantum information, and its first result: a parameter-free candidate for the fine-structure constant, derived from a single axiom, that matches its measured value to ten significant digits.
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, fundamental physics was rebuilt from its foundations. Between Planck’s quantum of 1900 and Dirac’s equation of 1928 came special relativity, general relativity, the quantum theory of the atom, and quantum mechanics itself, each a new framework and most of them confirmed within a few years. The decades that followed turned those frameworks into the Standard Model, whose structure was considered complete by the middle of the 1970s.
Since then, fundamental physics has been starved of new structure. The great experiments of the last fifty years, the W and Z bosons (1983), the top quark (1995), the Higgs boson (2012), and gravitational waves (2015), confirmed predictions made decades earlier. The genuine surprises of 1998, neutrino masses and the accelerating expansion of the universe, were found by experiment, explained by no theory, and added free parameters to a count that was meant to shrink. The drought is now longer than the golden age it followed. A drought that long is a sign that what is missing is not more data but a different starting point.
SpaceX appears to have lifted restrictions the Ukrainian military’s of use Starshield — the military-grade version of the company’s Starlink internet system.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Defense Minister Evgeniy Khmara told reporters that Starshield appears to be working normally again, although the military is still conducting tests and has not received an explanation for the restrictions.
This follows a 10-day period where Ukrainian drones would lose internet connectivity when flying at speeds of around 100 miles per hour, resulting in the military losing control of some drones, while others became more vulnerable because they were flying more slowly.
A startling announcement went out earlier this week: Due to recently discovered vulnerabilities in the open source programming language PHP, website owners had to immediately patch their sites — or if they couldn’t update right away, they should take the sites down to be safe.
On this week’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the significance of the PHP-ocalypse and whether we’ll see more incidents like this in the future.
Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool built as an alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely in August. The product let users automate email and task workflows using AI agents, but as OpenAI, Google, and other larger platforms built similar automation directly into their own tools, five-year-old Relay struggled to hold on to a reason to exist as a stand-alone product.
More recently, chatbot platform Character.ai filed for bankruptcy just five years after launching.
Instacart might sell itself to a larger competitor, according to multiple news reports
The Information reported Friday that the grocery delivery company has hired an investment bank to help it evaluate its options, and that it’s held acquisition talks with DoorDash. And Bloomberg reported that the company has also talked to Uber — although Uber reportedly walked away from those discussions.
Instacart currently has a market cap of more than $13 billion, and its stock price is up 25% for the year to date. The company could see this as a good time to sell at a desirable price, before the grocery delivery market gets more competitive — but Bloomberg noted that these are early discussions that might not result in a sale.
Jack Dorsey’s Block released a new voice model out of the company’s research lab that runs locally and sounds strangely human with its expressions like laughs, pauses, and cries. The company said the model, called Dessa, is trained fully on human speech and a single NVIDIA GPU rack.
A new model suggests Mars may host ice-forming physics never directly observed before.
Every morning during the Martian spring and summer, a thin and extremely long cloud emerges, only to disappear again. The wispy formation appears near the volcano Arsia Mons and gradually elongates until it reaches over 1,000 miles—about the distance from New York to Kansas City as the crow flies—before dissipating. This cycle then repeats for several months.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) have achieved a breakthrough in quantum physics, developing a way to study individual molecules on a surface with extraordinary precision. For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that molecules attached to a surface can reach the ultimate quantum limit of optical coherence, overcoming a major obstacle that has long restricted molecular quantum research.
The findings, published in Science, could open new possibilities for investigating how molecules interact with surfaces and developing advanced quantum technologies.
Why Surfaces Have Been a Major Obstacle in Quantum Physics
On Wednesday, a decades-old open-source web technology called PHP almost broke the internet, thanks to two vulnerabilities that had sat dormant for years until researchers recently figured out a way to exploit them.
Welcome to Kernel Panic, a weekly newsletter by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess from inside the new world of privacy and digital security. To receive this newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up here.
Most AI chatbots won’t outright tell you who to vote for, but some of the models behind them will. A new study found that when forced to choose in this year’s upcoming midterm elections, SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.7 recommended the Republican candidate in 92% of its answers, while OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Sol picked the Democrat in 97%. Across nearly 500 races, the two models agreed less than 10% of the time.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been genuinely excited about a new iPhone.
Internet security and web administration teams around the world are scrambling to prevent widespread disaster. On Wednesday, the developers behind the much-used PHP programming language released emergency security updates designed to fix critical flaws that could be exploited to allow attackers to gain dangerous remote control of victim systems.
The tiny remains of the Laurentide Ice Sheet began getting somewhat less tiny.
The $400 Boox Palma 2 Pro is a smartphone-sized e-reader designed for people who want to read books, articles, and documents on a small E Ink display. However, it offers more than just a dedicated reading experience because it runs Android and supports Google Play, giving you access to third-party apps. Think of it as a cross between a Kindle and a compact Android tablet.
As AI adoption spreads among both malicious hackers and defenders, even relatively unsophisticated cybercriminals are incorporating agentic AI into their campaigns and getting around model safeguards, according to new details published on Wednesday about recent successful attacks by four different threat groups.
Muse, the new general-purpose AI agent from Meta, can expose sensitive information when users share conversations through web links, researchers reported Monday. In response to questions from Ars about the behavior, Meta said it’s suspending the sharing feature while the company reviews it and considers making changes.
“We believe Canada should be able to reach orbit on its own terms.”
Welcome to Edition 9.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of SpaceX-related news this week including a couple of Thursday shockers. In one story, the company told the US Space Force thanks, but no thanks after being offered three military launch contracts. Then, on the civil space side of things, SpaceX’s Starship may required up to 22 refuelings to support a lunar landing, a NASA safety panel said.
Rather than downloading another app, a growing number of agents can simply be texted like an ordinary person.
You text it what you need, and it can remember context, connect to the apps and services you already use, and complete tasks on your behalf. That can mean scheduling an appointment, organizing a calendar, researching a trip, sending an email, making a reservation, shopping online, or reminding you about something days later.
While Instinct is one of the buzziest AI agents at present, thanks to its $10 billion valuation after its latest funding round of $1 billion, there are many others also making a play for this space.
Microsoft’s AI diagnostic system correctly diagnosed complex medical cases in a simulation more than twice as often as generalist physicians, according to a study published Thursday in Science. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI’s CEO, called the result a step toward “medical superintelligence.”
The system, dubbed MAI-DxO (DxO for short), coordinates several AI agents that act like a panel of doctors. They question a patient, order tests, and debate a diagnosis.
It’s morning. The money mule—or lavador, as the cartels call their pet launderers—steers into a sweltering strip mall parking lot somewhere in Miami. He pulls into an open space, looks around, opens his trunk. Before long the adjacent space is occupied by a bagman, who emerges with a package full of cash. A silent greeting, or maybe a quick pleasantry, and the bag goes into the trunk before the two men roar off in opposite directions. Easy as that, and several hundred thousand dollars changes hands. Glance at your phone and you might miss it.