“We keep finding the raw material of DNA in asteroids-what’s it telling us?”
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Accessed on 22 March 2026, 0325 UTC.
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).
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Today
On Monday, a paper announcing that all four DNA bases had been found on an asteroid sparked a lot of headlines. But many of the headlines omitted a key word needed to put the discovery in context: “again.” The paper itself cited similar results dating back to 2011, and the ensuing years have seen various confirmations and more rigorous studies. The new work was less notable for showing that we ha
Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the US government built its first rudimentary nuclear power plant in 1951 and continues to test cutting-edge technology. On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by
Yesterday
On Friday, a jury in California determined that Elon Musk had misled investors in Twitter via public statements that depressed the price of the company’s stock ahead of Musk’s purchase of the service. Because this was a class action lawsuit, Musk is likely to owe damages to a huge range of investors—payments that may ultimately reach billions of dollars. In the lead-up to Musk’s ultimate purchase
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There’s a virus you may have never heard of before that is estimated to infect up to 90 percent of people and lurks quietly in your cells for life—but if it becomes activated, it will destroy your brain. If that’s not startling enough, researchers reported this week that there may be a new way for this virus to activate—one that affects up to 10 percent of adults worldwide. The virus is the human
For the fourth time in a little more than a year, the US Space Force needs to send up a new satellite to replenish the military’s GPS navigation network. And once again, the company the Pentagon is paying to launch it can’t answer the call. United Launch Alliance, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was supposed to launch the final satellite for the Space Force’s GPS Block I
If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it? That’s the conundrum facing the Windows team at Microsoft right now. Windows VP Pavan Davuluri has gone on the recor
Shy Girl , a horror novel by Mia Ballard, was one of those buzzy books that leapt from self-published prominence into full-on trade publication. Until yesterday, that is, when publisher Hachette pulled the book from the UK market and canceled plans to bring it to the US. The move came after a New York Times investigation suggested that AI had been used in significant parts of the work. “If it isn
Hackers have compromised virtually all versions of Aqua Security’s widely used Trivy vulnerability scanner in an ongoing supply chain attack that could have wide-ranging consequences for developers and the organizations that use them. Trivy maintainer Itay Shakury confirmed the compromise on Friday, following rumors and a thread , since deleted by the attackers, discussing the incident. The attac
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NASA has taken a step forward to moving an undetermined spacecraft of a various size on an indefinite date to a yet-to-be-decided location. Or to put it another way: NASA is seeking to learn more about what it would take to remove the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian in Virginia and relocate it to Houston, as compared to transporting a smaller space capsule from anywhere in the countr
The Federal Communications Commission yesterday approved Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna, granting a waiver that lets the broadcast giant go way past the national limit on station ownership. Nexstar said it closed the acquisition late in the day yesterday, immediately after receiving the FCC approval. The deal was also approved by the US Department of Justice, but a group of
A member of an influential federal vaccine advisory panel made a dramatic claim Thursday afternoon that the panel had been disbanded following a temporary block by a federal judge and would be entirely reconstituted—again. But, just hours later, he retracted the claim, saying that it was merely a possibility. The claim immediately caused a stir online. Public health experts began to cheer the new
When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater in 2021, its primary mission was to scour the remnants of a dried-up Martian lakebed for signs of ancient life. Scientists have been focused on the crater’s spectacular Western Delta, a fan-shaped geologic feature deposited by a river flowing into the basin billions of years ago. But now Perseverance’s ground-penetrating radar (called RIMFAX)
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For more than 60 years, nearly every large rocket used some combination of the same liquid and solid propellants. Refined kerosene was favored for its easy handling and non-toxicity, hydrazine for its storability and simplicity, hydrogen for its efficiency, and solid fuels for their long shelf life and rapid launch capability. About 15 years ago, rocket companies started serious development of la
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Amazon is developing a new smartphone over a decade after discontinuing the Fire Phone, Reuters reported today, citing four anonymous “people familiar with the matter.” Reuters said the phone is codenamed Transformer but couldn’t confirm what it might cost, how much Amazon has invested into development thus far, or how much Amazon expects to make off the device. Like any product reportedly under
Valve’s Steam Machine desktop is currently in a state of involuntary limbo , driven by historically awful pricing and availability for memory and storage chips. AI data centers are absorbing much of what memory manufacturers can produce, leaving much less for enthusiast and hobbyist hardware like the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame VR headset. Even the years-old Steam Deck is currently out of s
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A landmark site in the peopling of the Americas is several thousand years younger than we thought. While that means very different things about the site itself, it doesn’t change the big picture as much as the researchers who generated the new date are claiming. University of Wyoming archaeologist Todd Surovell and his colleagues recently took a second look at the age of a site called Monte Verde
A little more than a month ago, SpaceX founder Elon Musk put down a marker of his intent to saturate low-Earth orbit with up to 1 million satellites. Its purpose? Provide always-on data center services around the planet. Now, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has done something similar with a filing to the Federal Communications Commission of his own, proposing a constellation of up to 51
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Despite being declared the third-hottest year on record, 2025 was a relatively quiet year for climate disasters in the US. No major hurricanes made landfall, while the total number of acres burned in wildfires last year—a way of measuring the intensity of wildfire season —fell below the 10-year average. But starting this week, the West is experiencing what looks to be a record-breaking heat wave,
One-pedal driving is not causing Tesla electric vehicles to suddenly accelerate when parked, according to federal regulators. For almost as long as Tesla has been selling cars, it has been hit with sporadic accusations of parked cars accelerating when they shouldn’t. Known to the industry as “sudden unintended acceleration,” the question for regulators is whether the problem is a human one or an
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Welcome to Edition 8.34 of the Rocket Report! The most important significant news this week, I believe, is the decision by Canada to make a serious investment in launch infrastructure at a spaceport in Nova Scotia. Tensions have risen between the United States and Canada of late (for reasons which are baffling to this author, who has always had an affinity for the nation to our north), and as a r
The film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary hits general release today, March 20, and it’s great —go see it! Though a little light on the science, the movie goes hard on the relationship between schoolteacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and an extraterrestrial named Rocky, and it’s a ride well worth taking. But as good as it is, the movie shares a small flaw with the book: Despite
Mar 19, 2026
In his role as health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a long-time anti-vaccine activist with no background in science, medicine, or public health—has made headlines for his thorough perversion of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 independent experts who made up the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. Th
A trade association of cloud service providers (CSPs) filed an antitrust complaint today with the European Union’s European Commission (EC) over Broadcom’s shuttering of VMware’s CSP partner program this year. Since Broadcom bought VMware, it has drastically cut the number of channel partners VMware works with, a shift that began with the elimination of VMware’s partner program . Broadcom replace
iPhone hacking techniques have sometimes been described almost like rare and elusive animals: Hackers have used them so stealthily and carefully against such a small number of hand-picked targets that they’re only rarely seen in the wild. Now a recent spate of espionage and cybercriminal campaigns has instead deployed those same phone-takeover tools, embedded in infected websites, to indiscrimina
Three years after saying it had stopped buying location data of Americans without a warrant, the FBI acknowledged it has restarted the purchases. During questioning at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing yesterday, FBI Director Kash Patel said the location data purchases have produced valuable information, and he did not commit to stopping the practice. In March 2023, then-FBI Direc
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If a battle is fought in space, it will look nothing like those depicted in the Star Wars franchise, with sleek TIE fighters blasting enemy ships with laser cannons and mag-pulses. Instead, these battles will be cerebral and unhurried, somewhat like the 1973 film The Day of the Jackal , a slow-burning political thriller with a plot that somehow mixes tension with clinical precision. In that film,
OpenAI announced Thursday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Astral, the company behind popular open source Python development tools such as uv , Ruff , and ty , and integrate the company into its Codex team. The deal, whose financial terms were not publicly disclosed, will help OpenAI “accelerate our work on Codex and expand what AI can do across the software development lifecycle,
The dream of the metaverse may have died for now, but Meta has decided it’s not completely giving up on the VR experience in Horizon Worlds, the virtual worlds service that it originally envisioned as the first step toward said metaverse. The news was announced via the Instagram account of Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. “We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in
On Wednesday, Afroman won a widely watched defamation lawsuit that seven cops filed after the rapper made music videos mocking them for conducting a 2022 raid of his home that resulted in no charges and no marijuana found. Videos for songs like “Lemon Pound Cake,” “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera,” and “Will You Help Me Repair My Door” used real footage from the raid, pulling from security
Google is planning big changes for Android in 2026 aimed at combating malware across the entire device ecosystem. Starting in September, Google will begin restricting application sideloading with its developer verification program, but not everyone is on board. Android Ecosystem President Sameer Samat tells Ars that the company has been listening to feedback, and the result is the newly unveiled
Apple’s MacBook Neo is impressive for its $600 price, but its A18 Pro processor is one of its biggest compromises compared to a modern MacBook Air— in our review , we found it was more than up to basic computing tasks, but for demanding workloads that benefit from more CPU and GPU cores and RAM, the Air is a better choice. But those limited computing resources are still enough to run Windows on y
For decades now, Counter-Strike players have gotten used to tapping the reload button whenever they have a spare, safe moment. Yesterday evening, though, Valve announced that it had decided this system needed “higher stakes,” overhauling Counter-Strike 2 ‘s reload mechanic in a way that could disrupt years of muscle memory for millions of players. Until now, reloading in CS2 has meant dumping the
People in North America adopted the bow and arrow as replacement weapons for the dart and atlatl about 1,400 years ago, according to a new paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus. But the adoption was almost immediate in southern regions, while people living farther north initially adopted the bow and arrow as a complement to their existing toolkit, gradually phasing out the atlatl and dart ove
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Germany recently banned TCL from marketing some of its TVs as QLED (quantum dot light-emitting diode), with a Munich court ruling that the TVs lack the quantum dot (QD) structure and performance associated with QLED TVs. The decision increases pressure on TV companies to be more honest with their marketing . Samsung has actively campaigned against TCL’s use of the term QLED. A year ago, Samsung s
Mar 18, 2026
If you’ve been using the Internet for any length of time, you’ve probably used a tool like Google Translate to convert webpages or snippets of text to and from languages ranging from Uzbek to Esperanto. But what if you want to translate into more esoteric “languages” like “LinkedIn Speak,” “Gen Z slang,” or “horny Margaret Thatcher” ? This week, many people across the Internet have been bemused t
The European Union may soon ban nudify apps after Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok emerged as a prime example of the dangers of an AI platform failing to block outputs that sexualized images of real people, including children . In a joint press release , the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Civil Liberties committees confirmed that lawmakers voted 101–9 (with 8 abstentions) to simplify the Artif
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In the US, the economics of coal power generation are marginal at best, and a large number of coal plants have shut down as cheaper renewables and natural gas have surged. The Trump administration has used a number of methods to swim against this economic tide, the simplest of which has been to order plants scheduled for closure to remain operational . The Department of Energy has used the Federa
Neanderthals may have used birch tar as more than just glue; it could have helped them ward off infection and even insect bites. People from several modern Indigenous cultures, including the Mi’kmaq of eastern Canada, use tar from birch bark to treat skin infections and keep wounds from festering. We know from several archaeological sites that Neanderthals also knew how to extract birch tar and t
Cloudflare said it has appealed a fine issued by Italy over the company’s refusal to block access to websites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The appeal is the latest step in Cloudflare’s fight against Italy’s Piracy Shield law. Piracy Shield is “a misguided Italian regulatory scheme designed to protect large rightsholder interests at the expense of the broader Internet,” Cloudflare said in a blog po
It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a “safe” gathering point near our planet. The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed “New Moon” mission to capture and relocate an asteroid appr
In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings. The tech giant’s “lack of proper detailed security documentation” left reviewers with a “lack of confidence in assessing the system’s overall security posture,” according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica. Or, as one member of
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It is a strange quirk of fate that the station wagon has morphed from mass-market family transport into something far more esoteric (at least here in the US, a market that once embraced the form factor like no other). Now, wagons come in two flavors. There’s the “slightly lifted with some extra protective cladding” kind, designed with forest roads in mind but equally useful if you’re surrounded b
We’ve got an official trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day , the follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home that is purportedly intended to launch a fresh trilogy of films with Tom Holland in the title role. Sony Pictures opted for a unique approach to building anticipation for the trailer, releasing snippets of footage throughout the day yesterday via the social media accounts of influencers and fans arou
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Last month, Discord quickly backpedaled after it announced that an age-verification system would roll out globally. Discord’s reversal followed a widespread user backlash, which also intensified scrutiny of the platform’s age-check partners . Suddenly, these often-overlooked players in the “age-assurance” ecosystem had to defend their tech or risk losing major contracts. The whole saga shined a h
BMW provided flights from Washington, DC, to Malaga, Spain, and accommodation so Ars could drive the iX3 and be briefed on the i3. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. MALAGA, Spain—Late last year, we got our first chance to driv