4+ mon, 3+ week ago  (260+ words) A rigid ice shell over a shrinking interior makes for pressures low enough to boil. Something that has received a bit less attention is that some of these orbital interactions are temporary or cyclical. The orbits of any body are…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago  (618+ words) The revised age may help make sense of 2-million-year-old stone tools elsewhere in China. Two skulls from Yunxian, in northern China, aren't ancestors of Denisovans after all; they're actually the oldest known Homo erectus fossils in eastern Asia. (Side note:…...

6+ day, 11+ hour ago  (332+ words) A now-vanished plate under North America may open the crust below Yellowstone. Now, a new paper suggests that the Farallon plate is still making its presence felt far from the coasts, powering one of North America's most distinctive phenomena: the…...

6+ day, 14+ hour ago  (580+ words) Supposed "first octopus" was something else entirely. To solve this puzzle, Thomas Clements, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester, and his colleagues put this supposed oldest octopus fossil through a series of high-tech imaging tests. They found Pohlsepia was…...

6+ mon, 1+ week ago  (1673+ words) AI is "comically good" at detecting small earthquakes'here's why that matters. On January 1, 2008, at 1: 59 AM in Calipatria, California, an earthquake happened. You haven't heard of this earthquake; even if you had been living in Calipatria, you wouldn't have felt anything....

6+ mon, 2+ week ago  (320+ words) It's a bit like a handheld 3 D printer, with all the accuracy challenges that implies. Most guns are tools for doing harm, but a team of American and Korean scientists has developed one that does the opposite, helping to patch…...

7+ mon, 4+ week ago  (48+ words) Ars Technica has been separating the signal from the noise for over 25 years. With our unique combination of technical savvy and wide-ranging interest in the technological arts and sciences, Ars is. .. Visitors have unearthed over 35, 000 diamonds at Crater of Diamonds…...

8+ mon, 3+ week ago  (772+ words) This is going to really help us understand how to predict space weather in the magnetosphere." Two NASA satellites rocketed into orbit from California aboard a Space X Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, commencing a $170 million mission to study a phenomenon of…...

9+ mon, 6+ day ago  (402+ words) John is Ars Technica's science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph. D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. John has done over a decade's worth of research…...

9+ mon, 2+ week ago  (1653+ words) "Nature is handing us an incredibly rare experiment." A little less than four years from now, a killer asteroid will narrowly fly past planet Earth. This will be a celestial event visible around the world'for a few weeks, Apophis will…...