A new age of commercial moon exploration is upon us, and one of the most exciting missions yet is about to launch—one laden with rovers, a drill, and even a hopper spacecraft that will try to “jump” into a permanently dark lunar crater to search for ice. The IM-2 mission, from Texas-based company Intuitive Machines,…
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Calculus is a powerful mathematical tool. But for hundreds of years after its invention in the 17th century, it stood on a shaky foundation. Its core concepts were rooted in intuition and informal arguments, rather than precise, formal definitions. Two schools of thought emerged in…
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Researchers at Microsoft have announced the creation of the first “topological qubits” in a device that stores information in an exotic state of matter, in what may be a significant breakthrough for quantum computing. At the same time, the researchers also published a…
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Just four West African countries are the foundation of an industry worth more than $100 billion. In the tropical nations of Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria, rows of cacao trees sprout pods bearing dozens of seeds. Once harvested, these humble…
Now the ball behaves more like you would expect. Its horizontal velocity decreases so that it falls behind the original car. But it’s still not going to hit your windshield. With air drag and loss of energy on impact with the ground, each bounce is a little lower than the one before. You should be…
Humans have been selectively breeding cats and dogs for thousands of years to make more desirable pets. A new startup called the Los Angeles Project aims to speed up that process with genetic engineering to make glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and dogs, and possibly, one day, actual unicorns. The Los Angeles Project is the brainchild…
Could a private company create forecasts on its own without NOAA data? It would be difficult for one company to provide comprehensive weather data in a reliable way that is also accessible to the entire public. Some companies might be able to launch their own satellite, but one satellite only gives you part of the…
So far the array has been tested in rats, with a version for dogs coming later, Lavella says. In a demo video viewed exclusively by WIRED, a Canaery scientist uses a wand to capture an air sample from four different petri dishes, each containing a different odorant. The wand beeps and sends the odor molecules…
When the frozen carbon dioxide has all melted in the summer, distinctive marks are revealed on the Martian landscape. These are known as “araneidoform terrain,” because they look like spiders when seen from space. Some of these spider-like landforms are more than a kilometer across, and some have hundreds of legs. They are often found…
The 2022 report includes an analysis of 82 universities, the indirect cost rate they receive from federal grants, and the indirect cost rate they receive from private funders such as the Sloan Foundation, Gates Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Ten of the schools in the Heritage Foundation analysis did not confirm their indirect cost…
