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  • A Starlink satellite seems to have exploded

    A Falcon 9 launched 29 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit on December 1st, 2025. | Image: SpaceX

    SpaceX says it has lost control of a Starlink satellite that’s now falling back to Earth after suffering an anomaly. The sudden loss of communications, drop in altitude, “venting of the propulsion tank,” and “release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects,” suggests the anomaly was some kind of explosion. SpaceX says it poses no threat to the crew of the ISS and will burn up in the atmosphere “within weeks.”

    This mishap comes a week after SpaceX reported a near miss with a Chinese satellite.

    Read the full story at The Verge.

  • These are the flying discs the government wants you to know about

    Four small satellites rode a Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle into orbit from Virginia early Thursday, beginning a government-funded technology demonstration mission to test the performance of a new spacecraft design.

    The satellites were nestled inside a cylindrical dispenser on top of the 59-foot-tall (18-meter) Electron rocket when it lifted off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at 12:03 am EST (05:03 UTC). A little more than an hour later, the rocket’s upper stage released the satellites one at a time at an altitude of about 340 miles (550 kilometers).

    The launch was the starting gun for a “proof of concept” mission to test the viability of a new kind of satellite called DiskSats. These satellites were designed by the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit federally funded research and development center. The project is jointly financed by NASA and the US Space Force, which paid for DiskSat’s development and launch, respectively.

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  • Does swearing make you stronger? Science says yes.

    If you’re human, you’ve probably hollered a curse word or two (or three) when barking your shin on a table edge or hitting your thumb with a hammer. Perhaps you’ve noticed that this seems to lessen your pain. There’s a growing body of scientific evidence that this is indeed the case. The technical term is the “hypoalgesic effect of swearing.” Cursing can also improve physical strength and endurance, according to a new paper published in the journal American Psychologist.

    As previously reported, co-author Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele, became interested in studying the potential benefits of profanity after noting his wife’s “unsavory language” while giving birth and wondered if profanity really could help alleviate pain. “Swearing is such a common response to pain. There has to be an underlying reason why we do it,” Stephens told Scientific American after publishing a 2009 study that was awarded the 2010 Ig Nobel Peace Prize.

    For that study, Stephens and his colleagues asked 67 study participants (college students) to immerse their hands in a bucket of ice water. They were then instructed to either swear repeatedly using the profanity of their choice or chant a neutral word. Lo and behold, the participants said they experienced less pain when they swore and were also able to leave their hands in the bucket about 40 seconds longer than when they weren’t swearing. It has been suggested that this is a primitive reflex that serves as a form of catharsis.

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  • Parasites plagued Roman soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall

    It probably sucked to be a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian’s Wall circa the third century CE. W.H. Auden imagined the likely harsh conditions in his poem “Roman Wall Blues,” in which a soldier laments enduring wet wind and rain with “lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.” We can now add chronic nausea and bouts of diarrhea to his list of likely woes, thanks to parasitic infections, according to a new paper published in the journal Parasitology.

    As previously reported, archaeologists can learn a great deal by studying the remains of intestinal parasites in ancient feces. For instance, in 2022, we reported on an analysis of soil samples collected from a stone toilet found within the ruins of a swanky 7th-century BCE villa just outside Jerusalem. That analysis revealed the presence of parasitic eggs from four different species: whipworm, beef/pork tapeworm, roundworm, and pinworm. (It’s the earliest record of roundworm and pinworm in ancient Israel.)

    Later that same year, researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of British Columbia analyzed the residue on an ancient Roman ceramic pot excavated at the site of a 5th-century CE Roman villa at Gerace, a rural district in Sicily. They identified the eggs of intestinal parasitic worms commonly found in feces—strong evidence that the 1,500-year-old pot in question was most likely used as a chamber pot.

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  • LLMs’ impact on science: Booming publications, stagnating quality

    There have been a number of high-profile cases where scientific papers have had to be retracted because they were filled with AI-generated slop—the most recent coming just two weeks ago. These instances raise serious questions about the quality of peer review in some journals—how could anyone let a figure with terms like “runctitional,” “fexcectorn,” and “frymblal” through, especially given the ‘m’ in frymblal has an extra hump? But it has not been clear whether these high-profile examples are representative. How significantly has AI use been influencing the scientific literature?

    A collaboration of researchers at Berkeley and Cornell have decided to take a look. They’ve scanned three of the largest archives of pre-publication papers and identified ones that are likely to have been produced using Large Language Models. And they found that, while researchers produce far more papers after starting to use AI and the quality of the language used went up, the publication rate of these papers has dropped.

    Searching the archives

    The researchers began by obtaining the abstracts of everything placed in three major pre-publication archives between 2018 and mid-2024. At the arXiv, this netted them 1.2 million documents; another 675,000 were found in the Social Science Research Network; and bioRxiv provided another 220,000. So, this was both a lot of material to work with and covered a lot of different fields of research. It also included documents that were submitted before Large Language Models were likely to be able to produce output that would be deemed acceptable.

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  • NASA will soon find out if the Perseverance rover can really persevere on Mars

    When the Perseverance rover arrived on Mars nearly five years ago, NASA officials thought the next American lander to take aim on the red planet would be taking shape by now.

    At the time, the leaders of the space agency expected this next lander could be ready for launch as soon as 2026—or more likely in 2028. Its mission would have been to retrieve Martian rock specimens collected by the Perseverance rover, then billed as the first leg of a multilaunch, multibillion-dollar Mars Sample Return campaign.

    Here we are on the verge of 2026, and there’s no sample retrieval mission nearing the launch pad. In fact, no one is building such a lander at all. NASA’s strategy for a Mars Sample Return, or MSR, mission remains undecided after the projected cost of the original plan ballooned to $11 billion. If MSR happens at all, it’s now unlikely to launch until the 2030s.

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  • US oil industry doesn’t see profit in Trump’s “pro-petroleum” moves

    As the Trump administration makes announcement after announcement about its efforts to promote the US fossil fuel industry, the industry isn’t exactly jumping at new opportunities.

    Some high-profile oil and gas industry leaders and organizations have objected to changes to long-standing government policy positions that give companies firm ground on which to make their plans.

    And the financial picture around oil and gas drilling is moving against the Trump administration’s hopes. Though politicians may tout new opportunities to drill offshore or in Arctic Alaska, the commercial payoff is not clear and even unlikely.

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  • Trump admin threatens to break up major climate research center

    On Tuesday, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, announced that a major climate research center will be “broken up.” The National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, is a significant contributor to research on the weather, climate, and other atmospheric phenomena. The move will be a crippling blow to climate research in the US and is being widely decried by scientists.

    Vought initially gave a statement regarding NCAR to USA Today and later confirmed the outlet’s reporting on social media. Calling it “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” Vought also decried what he termed “woke” activities at NCAR. These appear to be fairly typical efforts made to attract underrepresented groups to the sciences—efforts that were uncontroversial prior to the current administration.

    NCAR is primarily based in a complex on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado, and maintains a supercomputing center in Wyoming. Much of its funding comes from the National Science Foundation, but the day-to-day management is handled by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a nonprofit that represents 130 individual educational institutions. In addition to climate science, researchers based there study Earth and space weather, atmospheric chemistry, and their impacts on the environment and humans. NCAR hosts a series of webpages that explain its research and all the ways it helps society.

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  • Billionaire Jared Isaacman confirmed as new head of NASA

    The Senate confirmed Jared Isaacman’s appointment as the head of NASA on Wednesday, a decision that comes just months after President Donald Trump pulled his nomination before picking him yet again in November, as reported earlier by CNBC.

    Isaacman, the founder and CEO of a payments platform called Shift4, has flown to space twice through private missions with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. After choosing Isaacman as head of NASA in December 2024, Trump pulled his nomination in May, later saying in a Truth Social post that he thought it would be “inappropriate that a very close friend of Elon, who was in the Space Business, run NASA.”

    Isaacman attemp …

    Read the full story at The Verge.

  • Physicists 3D-printed a Christmas tree of ice

    Physicists at the University of Amsterdam came up with a really cool bit of Christmas decor: a miniature 3D-printed Christmas tree, a mere 8 centimeters tall, made of ice, without any refrigeration equipment or other freezing technology, and at minimal cost. The secret is evaporative cooling, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv.

    Evaporative cooling is a well-known phenomenon; mammals use it to regulate body temperature. You can see it in your morning cup of hot coffee: the hotter atoms rise to the top of the magnetic trap and “jump out” as steam. It also plays a role (along with shock wave dynamics and various other factors) in the formation of “wine tears.” It’s a key step in creating Bose-Einstein condensates.

    And evaporative cooling is also the main culprit behind the infamous “stall” that so frequently plagues aspiring BBQ pit masters eager to make a successful pork butt. The meat sweats as it cooks, releasing the moisture within, and that moisture evaporates and cools the meat, effectively canceling out the heat from the BBQ. That’s why a growing number of competitive pit masters wrap their meat in tinfoil after the first few hours (usually when the internal temperature hits 170° F).

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