Thirty seals, primarily weaned pups, have died since late last week, scientists said.
The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), which advises NASA and Congress on safety, has released its 2025 annual report on NASA’s performance and challenges. While the panel acknowledged NASA’s safety achievements, it warned that the agency’s biggest challenges stem from interconnected factors – workforce,...
NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway smiles up at the camera as he enters the International Space Station Feb. 14, 2026, after docking to the orbiting laboratory aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. Since Hathaway and fellow Crew-12 members Jessica Meir of NASA, Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency), and Andrey Fedyaev...
Steve Pearce, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management, has a long history of pushing to privatize federal property.
The president said he had negotiated a deal with tech giants to cover the energy costs of data centers, but offered few details. Experts said such pledges could prove difficult in practice.
The Nobel laureate Richard Axel is not accused of wrongdoing but called his association with Jeffrey Epstein a “serious error in judgment.”
In late February, people in the Northern Hemisphere can look up for a special sight: six planets will all be visible from clear and dark night skies. New sonifications from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released Feb. 25 will help commemorate this latest “planetary parade.” Because the planets in our solar system...
Eating nothing but oatmeal for just two days might sound extreme, but it delivered a striking payoff in a new clinical trial. People with metabolic syndrome who followed a short, calorie-reduced oat-based plan saw their harmful LDL cholesterol drop by 10%, along with modest weight loss and lower blood pressure. Even...
Certain nutrients critical for human health lack the shelf life needed to span multi-year missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. NASA’s BioNutrients-3 is part of an experiment series testing ways to use microorganisms to produce these nutrients in space and on demand. The on-demand nature of this experiment is...
Earth’s magnetic shield is shifting in dramatic ways. New data from ESA’s Swarm satellites show that the South Atlantic Anomaly — a vast weak spot in Earth’s magnetic field — has grown by nearly half the size of continental Europe since 2014. Even more striking, a region southwest of Africa has begun weakening even...
Two heads are better than one in the latest images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which reveal new detail in a mysterious, little-studied nebula surrounding a dying star. Nebula PMR 1 is a cloud of gas and dust that bears an uncanny resemblance to a brain in a transparent skull, inspiring its nickname, the […]
Mars’ frozen ice caps may be time capsules for ancient life. Lab experiments show that key building blocks of proteins can survive tens of millions of years in pure ice, even under relentless cosmic radiation. Ice mixed with Martian-like soil, however, destroys organic material far more quickly. The findings point...
Some butterfly species can’t grow unless they trick ants into taking them home with a complex rhythmic signal.
A lost cache of 250-million-year-old fossils from Australia has rewritten part of the story of life after Earth’s worst mass extinction. Instead of a single marine amphibian species, researchers uncovered evidence of a surprisingly diverse community of early ocean predators. One of these creatures had relatives...
Horses have a vocal trick no one fully understood until now. Scientists have discovered that when a horse whinnies, it produces two completely different sounds at the same time. One is a deep tone created by vibrating the vocal folds, similar to how humans sing. The other is a high-pitched whistle generated inside the...
More than 40,000 years ago, Ice Age humans were carving repeated patterns of dots, lines, and crosses into tools and small ivory figurines. A new computational study of more than 3,000 of these Paleolithic signs reveals that they were not random decorations but structured sequences with measurable complexity....
Satellite-based radar images show where a powerful earthquake in the Yukon, Canada, sent rock, snow, and ice spilling across the frozen landscapes of the St. Elias Mountains.
In an era of overt sexism in the sciences, she made two major discoveries, including identifying a chemical signal in the brain linked to chronic pain and migraines.
New findings about the anatomy of the dinosaur age’s fiercest predator suggest it chased prey “like an oversized bird.”
Written by Diana Hayes, Graduate student at York University, Toronto Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 20, 2026 This has been a pretty routine week for Curiosity. As was mentioned last week, we’re now in the final phase of the boxwork exploration campaign. We’re currently making our way toward the eastern contact of...
We talk to the author of a new book about why the problem is so hard to solve.
On April 8, 2024, volunteers participating in NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project all around the United States hurried to photograph the solar eclipse with the latest, greatest equipment, capturing groundbreaking images of the Sun’s corona.
After nearly 50 years of failed attempts and scientific speculation, chemists at Saarland University have achieved what many thought might be impossible: creating a long-sought silicon-based aromatic molecule. By replacing carbon atoms in a famously stable ring-shaped compound with silicon, the team synthesized...
Subtle changes in brain blood flow and oxygen use are closely linked to hallmark signs of Alzheimer’s, including amyloid plaques and memory-related brain shrinkage. Simple, noninvasive scans may one day help spot risk earlier—by looking at the brain’s vascular health, not just its plaques.
Deep inside the Milky Way, an invisible force is quietly holding everything together — its magnetic field. Now, researchers have created one of the most detailed maps ever of this hidden structure, revealing surprising twists in how it flows through our galaxy.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provided the first vertical view of Uranus’s ionosphere in this image released on Feb. 19, 2026, revealing auroras shaped by its tilted magnetic field. Getting a look at the structure of the region where the atmosphere interacts strongly with the planet’s magnetic field is giving us...
Groundbreaking “camera-on-a-chip” technology that was originally developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for use in space missions is currently employed in billions of devices like cell phones that are used daily by people worldwide.
Scientists have proposed a surprising connection between solar flares and earthquakes. When solar activity disturbs the ionosphere, it may generate electric fields that penetrate fragile fracture zones in Earth’s crust. If a fault is already critically stressed, this extra electrostatic pressure could help trigger a...
Deep in the Congo Basin, vast peatlands quietly store enormous amounts of Earth’s carbon — but new research suggests this ancient vault may be leaking. Scientists studying Africa’s largest blackwater lakes discovered that significant amounts of carbon dioxide bubbling into the atmosphere come not just from recent...
A newly identified ichthyosaur from the UK’s Jurassic Coast is rewriting part of the prehistoric playbook. Nicknamed the “Sword Dragon of Dorset,” the three-meter-long marine reptile lived during a poorly understood window of evolution when major ichthyosaur groups were disappearing and new ones emerging. Its...
Researchers are engineering bacteria to invade tumors and consume them from the inside. Because tumor cores lack oxygen, they’re the perfect breeding ground for these microbes. The team added a genetic tweak that helps the bacteria survive longer near oxygen-exposed edges — but only once enough of them are present to...
The nation’s northern region has led the scientific quest to understand the aurora borealis. This summer, a 10,000-antenna radar is expected to begin the next phase of exploration.
Horses, with their high-pitched whinnies, seemed to buck the trend of larger animals producing lower sounds, but a new study explains the mechanics behind the noises a horse makes.
Even Charles Darwin was puzzled by the evolution of the vertebrate eye. New research suggests that it traces back to a cyclopean invertebrate with a single eye atop the head.
Living in urban China may have given the insects the traits they needed to thrive in the United States, a new study suggests.
A Martian volcano once thought to be the result of a single eruption turns out to have a much more complex past. Orbital imaging and mineral data show it developed through multiple eruptive phases, all powered by the same evolving magma system underground. Shifts in mineral composition reveal the magma changed over...
Legions of fans from around the world have been cheering on Punch, a 7-month-old macaque who had been struggling to socialize at a zoo outside Tokyo.
The rocket will be removed from the launchpad in order for technicians to investigate and fix a malfunctioning helium system.
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