Tech Updates

In July 2025, a large, bright cosmic object visited from beyond our solar system. Only the third interstellar object ever discovered, the comet — named 3I/ATLAS — swooped through the inner solar system for about four months, briefly making it one of the biggest science celebrities in the world. The interstellar object’s fame stemmed in […]

A Pacific cyclone dubbed Polo exploded from a tropical storm into a powerful Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours on Tuesday (Sept. 22), with winds reaching speeds of 180 mph (290 km/h). Now drifting off the southwest coast of Mexico, Polo has been downgraded to a Category 4 storm but remains “a very

Two decades ago, scientists seemed on the verge of understanding biology in a new, quantum way. Life unfolds over an incomprehensible span of scales, from our planet-enveloping biosphere at one end, to individual cell-building biomolecules at the other. Even at its most microscopic, though, biology doesn’t really reach down to the quantum realm, in which

As of Aug. 30, 2026, NASA’s Curiosity rover has officially seen the sun rise and set over Mars’ reddish horizon more than 5,000 times in its quest to discover if life ever existed there. The rover was originally planned to operate for only two years, but the mission is still going strong more than 14

A metal detectorist in the west of Germany has discovered one of the largest hoards of Roman silver coins ever found in that country from the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. The pile includes more than 900 silver denarii — the denarius was the standard coin of the early Roman Empire — and weighs almost

The ongoing El Niño is breaching the “super” threshold as Earth crosses into unprecedented climate territory. El Niño, officially underway as of June 11, is a climate pattern that’s injecting extra heat into our already-warming world, threatening disruptive weather across the globe and a humanitarian crisis in some regions. While El Niño is part of

NASA’s latest space telescope has officially taken its first photos of our universe. Launched on Aug. 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is on its way to Lagrange point L2, a “parking spot” in space about a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth where it will begin scanning deep space. Using its 300-megapixel camera,

Lab mice who spend time in space seem to bear offspring with reduced reproductive capacity, a new study suggests. But what that might mean for human astronauts and their families is still unclear. The research, published June 30 in the journal PNAS, looked at female mice that had spent extended periods on the International Space

You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history. Even though it’s been recombined in every generation through sex and gained the occasional mutation, on the whole the genome has been stable and has been passed down reliably from your ancestors. But that’s not the entire story. Nearly half of your

More than two millennia ago, a ship carrying a wealth of iron sank in the Danube River in what is now Austria. Archaeologists have identified the “rusty treasure” as a collection of 500 iron bars — the largest cache of ancient iron ever discovered in Europe and enough metal to equip an army. The assortment

Roman’s first test image shows hundreds of stars as green rings of light. After a few more months of tuning, it will capture images as crisp as Hubble’s but 100 times bigger. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Tyler Desjardins (STScI)) Quick facts What it is: Hundreds of stars, captured in the Nancy Grace