Ars Technica Science

It's widely acknowledged that it's nearly impossible to publish negative results in scientific journals. "We didn't see anything" is a much harder sell than finding that a hypothesis is clearly right. Findings of no effect tend to either be shuffled off to low-profile journals or left behind as unpublished lab lore. The high-profile journal Nature, however, made a notable exception this week, publishing a study that tells us that a bunch of methods we have been using to try to measure a key emot

The world is set to miss its 2030 conservation goals as finance and action have fallen short, leaders recognized at a UN biodiversity summit in Armenia’s capital, where they agreed to step up efforts after a final overnight session. Representatives from almost 200 countries gathered in Yerevan over the past two weeks to review progress on a landmark agreement set four years ago to protect about a third of the world’s land and seas by 2030. The COP17 talks on biodiversity concluded on Saturday wi

Flying across several time zones often causes jet lag, a feeling when the body insists it's the middle of the night while the clock says it's lunchtime. Now it turns out this nuisance is not exclusive to humans. A new Science study on Manx shearwaters, seabirds that can fly hundreds of kilometers a day over the North Atlantic, shows they jet-lag themselves during their excursions. And because these birds navigate by the Sun, that jet lag leaves a measurable mark—it skews their compass. Clockwork

In May 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration released a lengthy briefing document on an experimental medication for a rare autoimmune form of vasculitis that often damages the kidneys and lungs. The agency was on the fence about whether to approve the treatment, and it wanted an independent advisory committee to weigh in. Among the questions at hand: Was the drug meaningfully better than existing therapies? Participants in the study, which had been conducted by the California biotechnology c

Crater counts tell us that most of the Martian surface is more than 3 billion years old, but pieces of Mars we have on Earth tell a different story. The three main classes of Martian meteorites—shergottites, nakhlites, and chassignites—are all 2.4 billion years old or younger. Until now, only two genuinely ancient Martian meteorites were known: Allan Hills 84001, found in Antarctica, and a jumbled rock from northwest Africa nicknamed Black Beauty. Now we have a third one. A team led by Yang Liu,

Welcome to Edition 9.17 of the Rocket Report! It's been a while since an American company announced plans for a medium-lift new launch vehicle, but that's what happened this week when a startup named Cowboy Space revealed specs for its Big Iron rocket, named for the classic country-western song by Marty Robbins. I'm a huge fan of the name. Maybe Cowboy Space is striking while the iron is hot as the space industry frets over demand for launch outpacing supply. However, Cowboy Space lags far behin

Rather than directly converting photons into electricity, concentrated solar energy uses mirrors to turn sunlight into heat, which can then be used to drive traditional generating turbines. Up to about a decade ago, there was a case to be made that concentrated solar energy had a bright future, as improvements in heat storage had turned it into a way to generate power around the clock. It wasn't to be. While concentrated solar costs fell enough to compete with nuclear power, the price of photovo

United Launch Alliance announced Wednesday it plans to return its Vulcan rocket to service on November 13, nine months after a solid rocket booster anomaly threw the company's 2026 launch schedule into oblivion. The return-to-flight mission will launch 40 satellites for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation, the first of 38 Vulcan flights Amazon has booked to deploy the bulk of its network. The mission will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and ULA said the launch date

The rapid decline of Antarctic sea ice since 2016 has triggered a dramatic shift in a crucial part of Earth’s climate system, scientists say. In a paper published Wednesday, researchers documented a sharp salinity increase in a vast layer of the Southern Ocean, extending from 2,300 to 4,000 feet deep and encircling Antarctica. The shift reverses decades of freshening and echoes ocean changes usually associated with major global climate shifts over millennia but is now happening in just a few yea

Protein design tools may be getting increasingly sophisticated, but you still need a sophisticated understanding of protein structure for them to work. This can include knowing enzyme mechanisms down to the positions of specific amino acids, as well as the water molecules that also occupy the area where catalysis takes place. Once you specify these, the tools can build the rest of a protein around this target. A large collaboration of researchers based in China, however, decided to bring protein

Dating back to around 400 CE and made of dichroic glass, the Lycurgus Cup is notable for exhibiting different colors depending on the light. (It gets its name from the scene depicted on its surface, of King Lycurgus of Thrace.) Light it from the front, and the cup looks green; light it from behind, and the color changes to a deep red. University of Sheffield scientists have re-created the original recipe to produce a contemporary glass sculpture with the same optical effect. The cup is considere

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. Since it was first recorded by a probe in 2018, scientists have been unable to find a plausible explanation for the existence of this clou

Barnes Ice Cap sits on the central plateau of Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic. It is the last surviving fragment of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the largest of the Pleistocene ice sheets, which at its peak buried most of Canada under two miles of ice and locked away around 80 meters of sea level. That remnant has now yielded direct physical evidence that ice sheets might have reversed their retreat and started to grow again thousands of years ago. In a recent Science study, researchers show t

Leaders in the US Space Force would like to have a new spaceport up and running in four years, adding a third heavy-lift launch site to relieve pressure from bases in Florida and California that have shot rockets into orbit for nearly 70 years. The obvious problem with that ambition is 2030 is four years away, and Pentagon officials have not determined where the new spaceport should go or how to acquire land for it. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink first mentioned the service's search for a third

Much of what we know about how a brain makes decisions comes from studying monkeys watching dots. In a task known as a random-dot-motion task, a cloud of flickering specks drifts weakly in one direction while the subject tries to determine whether—and in which direction— it’s moving. The task has shown that in the primate neocortex, neurons gather visual evidence over time, with their firing rates climbing until they cross a threshold, when the animal commits to a decision. But avian brains don’

Running complicated algorithms on quantum computing hardware is going to require the use of logical qubits, where collections of hardware qubits are linked together in ways that allow errors to be detected and corrected. In general, the more hardware qubits you dedicate to each logical qubit, the better the chances are of identifying errors. But, given that the hardware qubits are prone to errors, adding more of them also increases the probability that errors will occur. If the hardware error ra

Japan launched a $578 million mission Monday on a five-year expedition to land on the largest moon of Mars and retrieve samples for return to Earth, a daring international project that could yield new insights into the formation of the Solar System. The robotic Martian Moons eXploration mission, known as MMX, lifted off at 3:41 pm EDT Monday (4:41 am Japan Standard Time Tuesday) from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan. The MMX spacecraft rode into orbit atop a 207-foot-tall (63-meter) H3

A Russian military satellite maneuvered in "extreme proximity" of a commercial Earth-imaging satellite in recent days in the first known example an unsanctioned rendezvous in low-Earth orbit, according to orbital intelligence company LeoLabs. The Russian spacecraft, Kosmos 2612, "conducted a deliberate series of maneuvers toward ICEYE-X36, a US-operated commercial imaging satellite," LeoLabs said. "Kosmos 2612 closed from hundreds of kilometers away to extreme proximity to ICEYE-X36. It then man

The first order of business for the energy transition is electrifying applications like vehicles and heating and making sure that the electricity that powers them is made using renewables. But once the dominant slices of the emissions pie have shrunk, other categories with less potential to reduce emissions become important. A new study led by Haiwei Zhou at the University of Melbourne focused on the emissions associated with making lithium-ion batteries, which many parts of the energy transitio

The world’s first demonstration of a subsea geothermal power plant has taken place near an active underwater volcano almost a mile below the ocean surface. It generated less than 10 seconds of net-positive electricity but showed the technical feasibility of tapping another form of renewable energy underwater. The three-week test deployment of the 3-ton prototype power plant took place at the Axial Seamount in the northeast Pacific Ocean in September. Endurance Energy, the Seattle-based startup b