NASA will send a soccer ball to the moon — if the US wins the World Cup

For centuries, parchment manuscripts have preserved far more than the words written on their pages. Researchers have now uncovered a hidden layer of biological information locked inside these historic documents, opening a new avenue for studying the past without compromising the artifacts themselves. Historic parchments have long fascinated historians for the stories recorded in their…

NASA has picked more than 40 new space technology projects from U.S. companies, aiming to help build a long-term presence on the Moon and prepare for human missions to Mars. The agency will work with the companies through collaboration agreements instead of traditional contracts. Partnerships Instead of Contracts The 41 proposals come from 37 firms…

NASA awarded about $600 million in contracts to three companies today to put robotic landers on the Moon carrying NASA payloads. They are part of NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s “Moon Base” effort to send 10 robotic landers to the Moon every year beginning in 2027 during Phase 1 of the Moon Base project. One surprise…

Looking for extraterrestrial life in the form of biosignatures will involve peering into the constituents of a planetary atmosphere and identifying out of equilibrium gases that tell us something biological is going on. But here’s the problem, as demonstrated recently in work on the exoplanet K2-18b. We’ve identified dimethyl sulfide at this world, which might…

GUAREÑO, SPAIN—According to an article in The Greek Reporter, the wheels and parts of a 2,500-year-old miniature bronze chariot have been discovered in a monumental building at the Tartessian site known as Casas del Turuñuelo in southwestern Spain. In the area where the chariot parts were found, archaeologists had previously uncovered an altar shaped like…

Each spring, the Black Sea shifts from deep indigo to a milky, swirling turquoise. The color comes from coccolithophores, microscopic single-celled algae coated in tiny calcium carbonate plates that scatter sunlight in ways that dye entire ocean surfaces blue-green. On June 22, 2026, NASA’s PACE satellite captured the sea mid-bloom, its waters lit up from…