SpaceX takes down Dragon crew arm, giving Starship a leg up in Florida
Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is accustomed to getting makeovers. It got another one Wednesday with the removal of the Crew Access Arm used by astronauts to board their rides to space.
Construction workers first carved the footprint for the launch pad from the Florida wetlands more than 60 years ago. NASA used the site to launch Saturn V rockets dispatching astronauts to the Moon, then converted the pad for the Space Shuttle program. The last shuttle flight lifted off from Pad 39A in 2011, and the agency leased the site to SpaceX for use as the departure point for the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
SpaceX started launching from Pad 39A in 2017, then installed a new Crew Access Arm on the pad's tower the following year, replacing the aging shuttle-era arm that connected to the hatches of NASA's orbiters. SpaceX added the new arm ahead of the first test flight of the company's human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2019. Astronauts started using the pathway, suspended more than 200 feet above the pad surface, beginning with the first crew flight on a Dragon spacecraft in 2020.
By: Stephen Clark
Trump orders the military to make agreements with coal power plants
On Wednesday, a fossil-fuel lobbying group called the Washington Coal Club awarded President Trump a trophy that named him the "Undisputed Champion of Clean, Beautiful Coal." Trump took advantage of the opportunity to take his latest shot at reviving the fortunes of the US's most polluting source of electricity: an executive order that would make the military buy it.
Coal is the second most expensive source of power for the US grid, eclipsed by gas, wind, solar, hydro—everything other than nuclear power. It also produces the most pollution, including particulates that damage human lungs, chemicals that contribute to acid rain, and coal ash that contains many toxic metals. It also emits the most carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced. Prior to Trump's return to office, the US grid had been rapidly moving away from its use, including during his first term.
Despite the long-standing Republican claims to support free markets, the second Trump administration has determined that the only way to keep coal viable is direct government intervention. Its initial attempts involved declaring an energy emergency and then using that to justify forcing coal plants slated for closure to continue operations. The emergency declaration relied on what appears to be a tenuous interpretation of the Federal Power Act, and the administration was already facing a lawsuit challenging these actions.
By: John Timmer
Did seabird poop fuel rise of Chincha in Peru?
The pre-Inca Chincha Kingdom (circa 1000-1400 CE), along Peru's southern coast, was one of the most wealthy and influential of its time before falling to the Inca and Spanish empires. Scientists have long puzzled over the foundation for that prosperity, and it seems one critical factor was bird poop, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.
“Seabird guano may seem trivial, yet our study suggests this potent resource could have significantly contributed to sociopolitical and economic change in the Peruvian Andes,” said co-author Jacob Bongers, a digital archaeologist at the University of Sydney. “Guano dramatically boosted the production of maize (corn), and this agricultural surplus crucially helped fuel the Chincha Kingdom’s economy, driving their trade, wealth, population growth and regional influence, and shaped their strategic alliance with the Inca Empire. In ancient Andean cultures, fertiliser was power.”
Last November, Bongers co-authored a paper detailing evidence supporting the hypothesis that the mysterious "Band of Holes" on Mount Sierpe in the Andes might have been an ancient marketplace. Aerial photographs from the 1930s first revealed that long row of around 5,200 precisely aligned holes, seemingly organized into blocked sections, most likely constructed by the Chincha Kingdom. Scholars had suggested various hypotheses for what the site's purpose may have been: defense, storage, or accounting, perhaps, or maybe to collect water and capture fog for local gardens. But nobody had any strong evidence for those suggestions.
By: Jennifer Ouellette
What's next after the Trump administration revokes key finding on climate change?
Following three of the warmest years on record, as scientists reckon with climate tipping points and states and cities grapple with the escalating cost of extreme weather and more intense wildfires, the Trump administration this week is expected to formally eliminate the US government’s role in controlling greenhouse gas pollution.
By revoking its 17-year-old scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, the Environmental Protection Agency will demolish the legal underpinning of its authority to act on climate change under the Clean Air Act.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will be alongside President Donald Trump for an event Wednesday focused on boosting US use of coal, as mercury and air toxics standards are repealed. That is expected to be a prelude to Zeldin finalizing the endangerment finding repeal, an assignment the president handed him in an executive order signed on the first day of his second term in office.
By: Marianne Lavelle, Inside Climate News
SpaceX's next-gen Super Heavy booster aces four days of "cryoproof" testing
The upgraded Super Heavy booster slated to launch SpaceX's next Starship flight has completed cryogenic proof testing, clearing a hurdle that resulted in the destruction of the company's previous booster.
SpaceX announced the milestone in a social media post Tuesday: "Cryoproof operations complete for the first time with a Super Heavy V3 booster. This multi-day campaign tested the booster's redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength."
Ground teams at Starbase, Texas, rolled the 237-foot-tall (72.3-meter) stainless-steel booster out of its factory and transported it a few miles away to Massey's Test Site last week. The test crew first performed a pressure test on the rocket at ambient temperatures, then loaded super-cold liquid nitrogen into the rocket four times over six days, putting the booster through repeated thermal and pressurization cycles. The nitrogen is a stand-in for the cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen that will fill the booster's propellant tanks on launch day.
By: Stephen Clark
After Republican complaints, judicial body pulls climate advice
On Friday, a body that advises US judges revised the document it created to help judges grapple with scientific issues. The move came after a group of Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to complain about the document's chapter on climate change, with one of the letter's criticisms being that it treated human influence on climate as a fact. In response to the letter, the Federal Judicial Center has now deleted the entire chapter.
The Federal Judicial Center has been established by statute as the "research and education agency of the judicial branch of the United States Government." As part of that role, it prepares documents that can serve as reference material for judges unfamiliar with topics that find their way into the courtroom. Among those projects is the "Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence," now in its fourth edition. Prepared in collaboration with the National Academies of Science, the document covers the process of science and specific topics that regularly appear before the courts, like statistical techniques, DNA-based identification, and chemical exposures.
When initially released in December, the fourth edition included material on climate change prepared by two authors at Columbia University. But a group of attorneys general from Republican-leaning states objected to this content. At the end of January, they sent a letter to the leadership of the Federal Judicial Center outlining their issues. Many of them focus on the text that accepts the reality of human-driven climate change as a fact.
By: John Timmer
NIH head, still angry about COVID, wants a second scientific revolution
At the end of January, Washington, DC, saw an extremely unusual event. The MAHA Institute, which was set up to advocate for some of the most profoundly unscientific ideas of our time, hosted leaders of the best-funded scientific organization on the planet, the National Institutes of Health. Instead of a hostile reception, however, Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH, was greeted as a hero by the audience, receiving a partial standing ovation when he rose to speak.
Over the ensuing five hours, the NIH leadership and MAHA Institute moderators found many areas of common ground: anger over pandemic-era decisions, a focus on the failures of the health care system, the idea that we might eat our way out of some health issues, the sense that science had lost people's trust, and so on. And Bhattacharya and others clearly shaped their messages to resonate with their audience.
The reason? MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) is likely to be one of the only political constituencies supporting Bhattacharya's main project, which he called a "second scientific revolution."
By: John Timmer
Under Trump, EPA’s enforcement of environmental laws collapses, report finds
Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group.
By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the US Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than in the first year of the Biden administration.
Trump’s first administration filed 86 such cases in its first year, which was in turn a drop from the Obama administration’s 127 four years earlier.
By: Kiley Price, Marianne Lavelle, Inside Climate News
COVID-19 cleared the skies but also supercharged methane emissions
In the spring of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic brought global industry and travel nearly to a halt, satellite sensors recorded a dramatic plunge in nitrogen dioxide, a byproduct of internal combustion engines and heavy industry. For a moment, the world’s air was cleaner than it had been in decades.
But then something strange started happening: methane, the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, was surging. Its growth rate hit 16.2 parts per billion that year, the highest since systematic records began in the early 1980s. A new study published in the journal Science looked at the complex chemistry of the troposphere (the lowest region of the atmosphere) and found that the two changes are likely connected.
An atmospheric cleaner
Since the late 1960s, we knew that atmospheric methane doesn’t just vanish. It is actively scrubbed from the sky by the hydroxyl radical, a highly reactive molecule that breaks down methane, turning it into water vapor and carbon dioxide. “The problem is that the lifetime of the hydroxyl radical is very short—its lifespan is less than a second" says Shushi Peng, a professor at Peking University, China, and a co-author of the study. To do its job as an atmospheric methane clearing agent, a hydroxyl radical must be constantly replenished through a series of chemical reactions triggered by sunlight. The key ingredients in these reactions are nitrogen oxides, the very pollutants that were drastically reduced when cars stayed in garages and factories went dark in 2020.
By: Jacek Krywko
New critique debunks claim that trees can sense a solar eclipse
Last year, a team of scientists presented evidence that spruce trees in Italy's Dolomite mountains synchronized their bioelectrical activity in anticipation of a partial solar eclipse—a potentially exciting new insight into the complexities of plant communication. The findings naturally generated media interest and even inspired a documentary. But the claims drew sharp criticism from other researchers in the field, with some questioning whether the paper should even have been published. Those initial misgivings are outlined in more detail in a new critique published in the journal Trends in Plant Science.
For the original paper, Alessandro Chiolerio, a physicist at the Italian Institute of Technology, collaborated with plant ecologist Monica Gagliano of Southern Cross University and several others conducting field work in the Costa Bocche forest in the Dolomites. They essentially created an EKG for trees, attaching electrodes to three spruce trees (ranging in age from 20 to 70 years) and five tree stumps in the forest.
Those sensors recorded a marked increase in bioelectrical activity during a partial solar eclipse on October 22, 2022. The activity peaked mid-eclipse and faded away in its aftermath. Chiolerio et al. interpreted this spike in activity as a coordinated response among the trees to the darkened conditions brought on by the eclipse. And older trees' electrical activity spiked earlier and more strongly than the younger trees, which Chiolerio et al. felt was suggestive of trees developing response mechanisms—a kind of memory captured in associated gravitational effects. Older trees might even transmit this knowledge to younger trees, the authors suggested, based on the detection of bioelectrical waves traveling between the trees.
By: Jennifer Ouellette
The oldest-known humpback whale recording was hiding in an archive
In 1970, a single record would change history. It wasn’t the latest album from The Who or Rolling Stones, but the musical stylings of a pod of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). Songs of the Humpback Whale would go multi-platinum, whale songs were included on the Voyager Golden Record sent into space, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed by 1972. However, listening in on the humpback whale goes back even further than the far out days of the 1970s.
While digitizing archives, a group of researchers and archivists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts have now identified what may be the earliest preserved recording of a whale. The humpback song was captured on March 7, 1949, in the warm Atlantic waters near Bermuda. However, the team did not exactly know what they were hearing and the recording was never properly archived.
“Preserving data when it is created is an investment in the future of science,” Ashley Jester, Director of Research Data and Library Services at WHOI, said in a statement. “These recordings remind us why we collect data, even when we don’t immediately know what it means.”
Early eavesdropping
The recording was on a fragile yet well-preserved Gray Audograph. This device was first introduced in 1946 and was primarily used in offices to take dictation. It worked by etching audio onto thin plastic discs rather than magnetic tape.
When the etched recording was made, researchers aboard the R/V Atlantis were near Bermuda testing sonar systems, measuring explosive volumes, and conducting other acoustic experiments in partnership with the United States Office of Naval Research. Advances in audio technology were just beginning to allow recordings of underwater sound. The humpback sounds were likely recorded using the WHOI “suitcase,” an early experimental underwater acoustic recording system. Those soundscapes would prove how little we knew about what was making many of the ocean’s signature sounds.
At this time, WHOI scientist William Schevill and his mammalogist wife Barbara Lawrence, were laying the groundwork for the field of marine mammal bioacoustics. In 1949, they used an early hydrophone and a dictating machine to record beluga whales in eastern Canada’s Saguenay River. This beluga recording was the first that identified the sounds from a marine mammal in the wild. Many of these recordings from the late 1940s are poorly preserved and often inaccessible, as science could not reliably identify which ocean sounds were produced by marine mammals at the time.
“Data from this time period simply don’t exist in most cases,” said Laela Sayigh, a marine bioacoustician and senior research specialist at WHOI. “The ocean is much louder now, with increases in both number and types of sound sources. This recording can provide insight into how humpback whale sounds have changed over time, as well as serving as a baseline for measuring how human activity shapes the ocean soundscape.”
Most of the recordings from this era have been lost as the tapes deteriorated. However, the surviving audograph discs show that the format may have been uniquely used for underwater sound. They are considered a rare and possibly singular example of preserved early ocean listening.
“These audograph discs survived because of their material and careful preservation,” said Jester. “WHOI’s audograph collection reflects a chain of close observation and curiosity—first by the scientists and engineers who recorded underwater sounds they couldn’t explain, and now by the librarians, archivists, and audio preservation experts who were determined to keep digging.”
From the audograph to robots
Unsurprisingly, a lot has changed in the almost 80 years since this recording was made. WHOI scientists now use passive acoustic buoys, sleek Slocum gliders, and autonomous hydrophones to monitor ocean acoustics. These technologies help acousticians gather datasets that are used to study marine life, track human impacts on the ocean, and understand long-term environmental changes.
Specifically, Robots4Whales program is focused on protecting marine mammals. It uses autonomous ocean robots equipped with the Digital Acoustic Monitoring Instrument (DMON), which can detect whales in real-time. DMONs carry a low-frequency detection and classification system that can identify various marine mammal calls by analyzing how the sound frequency changes over time. It then makes “pitch tracks” from spectrograms that allow the system to classify calls based on a known library of whale calls. The results are then sent back to shore via satellite in near-real time.
“Underwater sound recordings are a powerful tool for understanding and protecting vulnerable whale populations. By listening to the ocean, we can detect whales where they cannot easily be seen,” added Peter Tyack, a marine bioacoustician and emeritus research scholar at WHOI. “At the same time, these acoustic tools let us track how human activity, from shipping noise to industrial sounds, changes the ocean soundscape and affects the way whales communicate, navigate, and survive.”
The post The oldest-known humpback whale recording was hiding in an archive appeared first on Popular Science.
By: Laura Baisas
Comet 3I/ATLAS is leaving the solar system with a dramatic light show
After months of unprecedented observations, astronomers are bidding goodbye to the beloved comet 3I/ATLAS. First spotted in July 2025, the frigid, dusty space rock is only the third known interstellar object to pass through the solar system, offering researchers the rare opportunity to examine a visitor from deep space. Among other discoveries, scientists have since confirmed that the interstellar comet is the fastest ever recorded as well as covered in ice volcanoes—and definitely not extraterrestrial tourists.
But even as it continues speeding away from Earth at a rate of around 130,000 miles per hour, astronomers are still learning new information from 3I/ATLAS. In a newly published research note, NASA describes a recent, striking turn of events on the comet’s surface. In December 2025, the agency’s SPHEREx space observatory recorded a massive spike in brightness from 3I/ATLAS. The display took place about two months after the comer reached its closest distance to the sun, and allowed researchers to better catalog more of the comet’s various organic molecules, including cyanide, methane, and methanol.
“Comet 3I/ATLAS was full-on erupting into space in December 2025, after its close flyby of the sun, causing it to significantly brighten. Even water ice was quickly sublimating into gas in interplanetary space,” explained astrophysicist and study lead author Carey Lisse. “And since comets consist of about one-third bulk water ice, it was releasing an abundance of new, carbon-rich material that had remained locked in ice deep below the surface.”
Earlier SPHEREx observations taken in August 2025 recorded a comet coma with large amounts of carbon dioxide, along with smaller levels of carbon monoxide and water. 3I/ATLAS traveled nearest to the sun that October. By December, SPHEREx detected a diversified amalgamation that included organics and rocky debris along with the earlier materials.
At first glance, this delay in sublimation (the transition from a solid to gas) might not make sense. After all, why wouldn’t the process start when 3I/ATLAS is nearest to the sun? While that’s certainly when it reaches peak exposure to solar radiation, it still takes time for all that energy to reach the comet’s deepest layers. In this case, materials did not begin sublimating until two months later. Part of this delay is likely also due to the comet’s ancient origins.
“The comet has spent ages traversing interstellar space, being bombarded by highly energetic cosmic rays, and has likely formed a crust that’s been processed by that radiation,” said Caltech mission instrument scientist Phil Korngut. “But now that the Sun’s energy has had time to penetrate deep into the comet, the pristine ices below the surface are warming up and erupting, releasing a cocktail of chemicals that haven’t been exposed to space for billions of years.”
It remains to be seen when—or even if—another interstellar object will visit the solar system in our lifetimes. But tools like SPHEREx are already giving astronomers mountains of data to scour long after the light from 3I/ATLAS fades from view.
The post Comet 3I/ATLAS is leaving the solar system with a dramatic light show appeared first on Popular Science.
By: Andrew Paul
The U.S. Olympic bobsled team borrowed Honda’s wind tunnel for test runs
In the daredevil sport of bobsledding, intrepid athletes crammed into a narrow sleigh offer their fates to gravity as they hurl down a banked, twisty ice track. Races can be won or lost in one hundredth of a second. The sleds reach speeds of 90+ miles per hour and the athletes withstand forces up to 5g. Some call it the ‘Formula One of ice’ for its potent combination of danger and speed.
With that in mind, it makes sense that the U.S. bobsled team worked with Honda to help them achieve their best times on the biggest athletic stage of the world: the Olympics. At Honda’s East Liberty, Ohio, facility, the Team USA Bobsled and Skeleton teams prepared to compete at the Olympic Winter Games in northern Italy.
Using Honda’s $124 million, 110,000 square-foot wind tunnel, engineers reviewed data, suggested tweaks, and put their racing expertise to use. Racing is a core component of Honda’s DNA. Usually, though, it’s for motorized—not gravity-based—vehicles. According to Wind Tunnel Lead for Honda America Mike Unger, his highly skilled team was challenged in ways they hadn’t been before.
“I’ve been with Honda for 33 years, and I’ve done a lot of crazy things and developed a lot of unique things,” Unger says. “I never thought I would ever be developing a bobsled, and it was pretty cool. Honestly, putting this thing out there and competing on the world stage is kind of a big deal.”
Tiny adjustments can lead to gold
Wind tunnels are fierce, specialized constructs with equipment built to create maximum wind speeds of up to nearly 193 miles per hour. That’s mightier than a Category 5 hurricane, but with much more control. Honda uses its Ohio wind tunnel to measure aerodynamic flow quality for vehicle development and improve the coefficient of drag. For consumers, that translates to better range for EVs and efficient use of fuel in gas-powered cars and SUVs.
The partnership began organically: a connection to one of Honda’s racing team engineers casually mentioned that it would be interesting to bring the U.S. bobsled team to the wind tunnel for testing. Unger was consulted, and he started the ball rolling. Once the plan to move forward was in place, the engineering team posed three major questions to the bobsled team: How can we help? What do you need from us? How can we help you win gold medals?
In August and September of last year, Team USA athletes from the bobsled and skeleton teams traveled to Ohio for testing. The Honda engineers helped the teams understand and document the results, offering analysis to create the best aerodynamic performance.
Through science, the testing busted some myths about bobsled aerodynamics that had been previously believed.
“There was this thought that you had to have all the athletes in perfect alignment all the time, all the way down the run,” Unger says. “So we said, ‘Okay, what happens if positions two, three and four are to the left and the pilot is to the right?’ What we learned was while it is a very slight aerodynamic negative it’s not as bad as anyone thought. It’s a very small effect, whereas popping your head up made a significant impact versus leaning to the left or leaning to the right.”
Tests also revealed that positioning of each athlete’s helmet also made a difference. The helmet isn’t a simple sphere; tilting that shape affects performance, as does the position of each athlete.
“You have to remember, they’re experiencing three…four… even five Gs in the corners, so it’s impossible for them to hold that exact position all the time,” Unger says. “But we did provide documentation of what [the angle] looks like so then they can try to get back to that optimum position when they can.”
Innovation via side projects
Staff at the Honda Automotive Laboratories in the Ohio facility don’t typically work with Olympic teams. This is somewhat of a passion project that adds to their workload, but it’s one that stokes innovation. Unger himself says he is an “avid speed freak” who also indulges in motorcycle drag racing, kart racing, and jet skiing. Helping the bobsled and skeleton athletes is a way for his team members to step outside of their lane.
“All the engineers that are working on this have their day jobs, working on the next Honda Pilot or Acura MDX or whatever it may be, and they’ve taken this job on as an extra thing to do,” Unger says. “There are a lot of passionate, very talented people here at ADC and they’re all very excited to help out the Olympic team. And to be honest, it’s an extremely good side project for them that gets them to think in a little bit different way.”
The project isn’t even close to finished, either. This program runs through the 2030 games and Honda is working with the teams to develop a new four-person sled and then a two-person sled. By 2030, the US bobsled team will be competing in these aerodynamically improved new sleds that were tested and developed in Honda’s wind tunnel.
“It was completely game changing,” said Team USA bobsled athlete and world champion Kayla Love in a documentary released on February 11. “And the information we were able to find, maybe you’re in the same exact position but maybe you’re tilting your head a tiny bit back or a tiny bit forward and it can make a world of difference.”
The post The U.S. Olympic bobsled team borrowed Honda’s wind tunnel for test runs appeared first on Popular Science.
By: Kristin Shaw
Shimmering Light in Egg Nebula
This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope released on Feb. 10, 2026, reveals a dramatic interplay of light and shadow in the Egg Nebula, sculpted by freshly ejected stardust. Located approximately 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Egg Nebula features a central star obscured by a dense cloud of dust — like a “yolk” nestled within a dark, opaque “egg white.”
It is the first, youngest, and closest pre-planetary nebula ever discovered. (A pre-planetary nebula is a precursor stage of a planetary nebula, which is a structure of gas and dust formed from the ejected layers of a dying, Sun-like star. The term is a misnomer, as planetary nebulae are not related to planets.)
Read more about the Egg Nebula.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, Bruce Balick (UWashington)
By: Monika Luabeya