Forget the sale of the century. The auction house Sotheby’s has geared up for the sale of the epoch. On July 14 it opened live bidding on assorted fossils, but the pièce de résistance is lot 20, a rare 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.

The specimen—dubbed Gus—is billed as one of the largest, most complete T. rexes ever found. Gus is expected to fetch up to $30 million and will go to the highest bidder, whether public museum or private collector. The latter have played an increasingly prominent role in buying fossils, with auction houses, according to paleontologists, contributing to the trend by building hype. But when private collectors swoop in and buy fossils at auction as luxury assets, those pieces of history are effectively lost to science.

By nearly all accounts, Gus is a big deal. In its description, Sotheby’s boasts that the specimen, which was discovered on a ranch in South Dakota, comprises “an incredible 183 fossil bone elements” making it “approximately 61% complete by bone count.” The fossil remains have been mounted in a custom steel armature along with replicas of the missing bones. The result is a reconstructed skeleton posed as if in hot pursuit, its mouth full of dagger teeth ready to tear into prey.

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Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have developed a novel conductive ink that can be painted directly onto the skin in colorful custom designs, turning into a functional electrode for biomonitoring after drying. They described their work in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

As previously reported, epidermal electronics attached to the skin via temporary tattoos (e-tattoos) have been around for more than a decade. So-called e-tattoos connect to skin without adhesives, are practically unnoticeable, and are typically attached via temporary tattoo, allowing electrical measurements (and other measurements, such as temperature and strain) using ultra-thin polymers with embedded circuit elements.

However, these e-tattoos have their limitations, most notably that they don’t function well on curved and/or hairy surfaces, as well as requiring personalized electrode placement design to cover larger areas, since biosignals are spatially distributed. So scientists have been getting creative. For instance, in 2024, researchers developed special polymer-based conductive inks that can be printed onto a person’s scalp to measure brain waves, even if they have hair. This could one day enable mobile EEG monitoring outside a clinical setting, among other potential applications.

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The next test flight of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster could take off as soon as Thursday, and much of the hour-long mission will look a lot like the last Starship flight in May.

But there are a few key differences for this launch, set to occur during a launch window that opens at 5:45 pm CDT (22:45 UTC) on Thursday. The most notable change is the inclusion of real, functioning Starlink satellites inside Starship's cargo bay. SpaceX previously tested the ship's payload deployment mechanism using simulators mimicking the mass and dimensions of the company's next-generation Starlink Version 3 broadband satellites.

This time—Starship's 13th full-scale test flight and the second to use SpaceX's newest version of Starship—technicians have installed 20 Starlink V3 satellites into the ship's deployer, a system of pulleys and cables designed to eject a stack of satellites one at a time through an opening on the side of the spacecraft. The satellites will not be part of SpaceX's operational network, but engineers will attempt to briefly establish laser communication links between the Starlink V3s and other spacecraft flying in low-Earth orbit. If successful, these links will validate Starlink V3's interoperability with SpaceX's previous generation of Starlink satellites.

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Watering your lawn in the summer can be both pragmatic and fun with so-called "silly sprinklers," designed to create amusing loops and spirals of water jets. And there's some fascinating physics at work to boot. Researchers at New York University's Courant Institute conducted a series of experiments with different silly sprinkler designs to find the answer to a longstanding problem in fluid dynamics, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As previously reported, the reverse sprinkler problem is associated with physicist Richard Feynman because he popularized the concept, but it actually dates back to a chapter in Ernst Mach’s 1883 textbook The Science of Mechanics (Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargerstellt). Mach’s thought experiment languished in relative obscurity until a group of Princeton University physicists began debating the issue in the 1940s.

Feynman was a graduate student there at the time and threw himself into the debate with gusto, even devising an experiment in the cyclotron laboratory to test his hypothesis. One might intuit that a reverse sprinkler would work just like a regular sprinkler, merely played backward, so to speak. But the physics turns out to be more complicated. “The answer is perfectly clear at first sight,” Feynman wrote in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985). “The trouble was, some guy would think it was perfectly clear [that the rotation would be] one way, and another guy would think it was perfectly clear the other way.”

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The same question drives both the plot of Moana and decades of archaeological research: Why, after centuries of relative stability, did Polynesian voyagers suddenly begin settling islands thousands of kilometers away across the Pacific?

The latest Moana movie is a live-action adaptation of a Disney animated movie of the same name. While the films are fictional, they draw inspiration from the rich seafaring heritage of Polynesian peoples, whose ancestors undertook one of the greatest episodes of maritime exploration in human history.

New climate evidence may help us understand why they embarked on these voyages.

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WD 1856 b is the only confirmed case of a planet that survived the death of a Sun-like star. It’s a Jupiter-size world orbiting a white dwarf—the burned-out remnant of a Sun-like star. Now, a team of astronomers has used the James Webb Space Telescope to take a closer look at this planet for the first time, and what they found makes an already strange system even stranger.

A feeding frenzy

WD 1856 b was an accidental discovery. Astronomers pointed the TESS observatory at a sample of roughly 2,000 white dwarfs in 2020. These stars are the remains of a Sun-like star that have already gone through a red-giant phase, leaving behind an Earth-size body that’s primarily composed of elements like carbon and oxygen. The TESS team was searching for small objects like comets or asteroids that might transit across the face of these dead stars.

What they found in the WD 1856 system was a gas giant. “As soon as they looked at it, they said, okay, that’s weird,” said Christopher O’Connor, a theoretical astrophysicist at Cornell University and co-author of the recent Nature study on WD 1856 b.

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The federal government is rewriting its rules governing ranching on public lands to increase the number of cattle, sheep, and other livestock grazing on 155 million acres in the West, an area twice the size of New Mexico.

Public lands grazing is overseen by a nearly century-old system that heavily subsidizes some of the wealthiest Americans while doing little to address its harms to the environment, ProPublica and High Country News found last year.

Even though rangeland management experts say overgrazing has degraded public lands, the new rules being drafted by the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management—the first overhaul since 1995—would instead expand the practice.

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There are some obvious big picture issues that stand between us and useful quantum computing. Issues like whether we can make enough high-quality hardware qubits to connect into the error-corrected logical qubits we need, and how we generate the states needed to perform universal computation on those logical qubits. But there are also many less prominent challenges that will need to be solved before we can perform calculations.

One of those challenges, which only affects some types of hardware, is calibration. For devices we manufacture, like superconducting qubits, there are always subtle variations among individual qubits. (This is not true when we use something like an atom to hold the qubit, but the lasers that control them can drift.) As a result, this hardware is put through a process called calibration, where we test different frequencies and amplitudes of the microwave pulses that control them to find the combination that produces the lowest error rates, and then save those settings for use in calculations.

However, you can't perform the typical calibration process while you're doing calculations, which means drift becomes an issue for long and complicated algorithms. Google, though, has figured out that it's possible to do calibration using the same data that's used for error correction.

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Back in 2024, we reported on the discovery of the Quest shipwreck, the polar exploration vessel that served Arctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton on his last voyage. Shackleton died before reaching their destination, and the ship sank in 1962. The Royal Canadian Geographic Society (RCGS) has now released the first images of the wreck more than 60 years after it sank, published in Canadian Geographic magazine.

Shackleton, of course, is most famous for his ill-fated voyage on the Endurance, which became trapped in sea ice in 1914 and sank. Shackleton and his crew defied the odds and survived. (The Endurance shipwreck was finally found in 2022.) By the time Shackleton returned to England, the country was embroiled in World War I, and many of his men enlisted. Shackleton was considered too old for active service. He was also deeply in debt from the Endurance expedition, earning a living on the lecture circuit. But he still dreamed of making another expedition to the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska to explore the Beaufort Sea. He got funding from an old school chum, John Quillier Rowett.

Shackleton purchased a wooden Norwegian whaler, Foca I, which his wife Emily renamed Quest. When the Canadian government withdrew its support, the mission shifted back to the Antarctic, and the Quest received an extensive retrofit. The improvements included a new deckhouse, a heated crow’s nest, a wireless set, and an odograph for tracing and charting the route automatically, as well as a Lucas deep-sea sounding machine, a large and pricey collection of cameras and photographic equipment, and even a small airplane.

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Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that a rotating mass like the Earth pulls the fabric of space and time around with it in a perpetual swirl. This phenomenon is known as frame dragging or the Lense-Thirring effect, after the two physicists who modeled it back in 1918. Frame dragging becomes more significant with larger masses and faster rotation, so we’ve mainly observed it around huge black holes.

Measuring how much the Earth twists spacetime as it rotates has been much more challenging because our pale blue dot of a planet is millions of times lighter than a typical black hole and rotates rather slowly.

But now, a team of astronomers led by Ignazio Ciufolini, a physicist at the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics in China, reports the most accurate measurement of the terrestrial Lense-Thirring effect to date. Their work brings our uncertainty down from a few percentage points to just 0.2 percent. And they did it with a satellite that looks like a cross between a golf ball and a disco globe.

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If you're reading this while the blinds are drawn against yet another heat wave and wondering whether it’s finally time to buy an air conditioner, you're far from alone. At the end of June, as temperatures climbed well above 40° Celsius across Europe, shoppers in France literally forced their way into stores to snatch up portable fans and ACs before they sold out. Such scenes are likely to become more common. As the planet warms, the demand for cooling is rising worldwide. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts two-thirds of households could own an AC by 2050.

Politicians are, of course, turning ACs into a weapon in their broader culture wars. Far-right figure Marine Le Pen pledged to roll out air-conditioning across France if her party comes to power, while the British Conservatives vowed to overturn net-zero rules that restrict AC installation in new builds. On the left, the argument runs that air-conditioning would mainly benefit the rich and not those who need it most. It would also lock Europe into the same high-energy cooling spiral seen in the US and Asia. To date, only around 20 percent of Europeans have AC at home (and a mere 4 percent in the UK), compared with roughly 90 percent in the US, where electricity is considerably cheaper.

In Europe, air-conditioning is no longer just about comfort. It helps adults stay productive through extreme heat, and children concentrate in poorly ventilated schools. It helps people nod off when the air is still stiflingly warm long after sunset. It can even save lives. One research group estimated that air-conditioning prevented nearly 200,000 premature deaths among people over 65 in 2019 alone.

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Until about 60,000 years ago, diminutive hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (affectionately nicknamed Hobbits for obvious reasons), shared the island of Flores with Komodo dragons, pygmy elephants, and giant rats.

Based on the presence of hominin and pygmy elephant bones in the same layers of cave sediment, it originally looked like the Hobbits had hunted and butchered dwarf elephants—an impressive feat for such a tiny hominin. But according to University of Tübingen anthropologist Elizabeth Veatch and her colleagues, it was the Komodo dragons that were the hunters, while the Hobbits only showed up to scavenge what was left.

If Veatch and her colleagues are right, their findings may challenge some of the assumptions we’ve made about Homo floresiensis—and about which hominin species was the first to venture into the wider world beyond Africa.

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It wasn't easy to find anyone outside of SpaceX clamoring for a rocket like Starship just 10 years ago. Today, the space industry can't wait for Starship to finally deliver.

With a payload capacity of more than 100 metric tons (220,000 pounds) to low-Earth orbit, SpaceX's new rocket is changing the thinking of just about everyone in the space industry. With the unrealized but potentially game-changing benefits of refueling, Starship could carry the same amount of payload to higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars.

It's important to note that Starship is still very much in its experimental phase, far from proving Elon Musk's loftiest claims about what it can do. Still, NASA and the US military are considering novel ways to use Starship to fly to the Moon or transport cargo to far-flung war zones. Scientists are eager to use its enormous volume to launch giant space telescopes. Competitors are taking notice. China, the strongest strategic adversary America has ever faced, is looking for its own Starship. Now, some US satellite manufacturers are adapting for the substantial capacity of the world's most powerful rocket.

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TikTok's For You Page (FYP) is the default home screen for users of the video-sharing platform. It's a personalized, algorithmically driven content feed, but the approach differs from other social media in that TikTok's algorithm relies heavily on implicit signals—such as how long users watch particular videos—as well as explicit signals such as likes or follows. And generally, that algorithm does remarkably well at predicting which videos will interest particular users.

But some users have voiced concerns that TikTok's almighty algorithm doesn't seem to incorporate negative feedback very well. Even when they don't watch a suggested video or click the "not interested" feature, they keep seeing those videos on their FYP. Northeastern University computer scientists put those suspicions to the test. According to their recent paper, the engagement signals do have an effect, but only temporarily. Then the algorithm gradually relapses unless a user consistently gives the same feedback over and over again.

The research group specializes in "algorithm audits," co-author Piotr Sapiezynski told Ars, to better understand online platforms: "how they work, how they fail, when they fail, how they harm individuals and societies." In this case, he and his co-authors wanted to take a closer look at user agency after hearing multiple anecdotal reports from TikTok users that their negative feedback—responding to prompts by indicating they aren't interested or want to see less of a certain kind of video—doesn't seem to remove those posts from their FYP. "On the other hand, it's unclear why the platforms would offer it, if it doesn't work," said Sapiezynski.

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The proliferation of nuclear power in space got a little more real Tuesday with the launch of a small satellite developed by a Florida-based company specializing in nuclear micro-power technology.

It's a long way from launching a bona fide nuclear reactor, a breakthrough that could help power a permanent Moon base and efficiently drive rockets throughout the Solar System. But you have to start somewhere.

The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude.

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One of the central features of plate tectonics is the formation of new crust at mid-ocean ridges. Part of the spreading process that drives continents apart, it was arguably the discovery of these ridges that drove widespread acceptance of plate tectonics as a theory. Thanks to decades of exploration, we now have a good picture of what the crust that forms at the site of spreading looks like. But we still have an incomplete idea of how its features are actually produced.

In other words, we have a good idea of the outcome of the process, but not a detailed picture of the process itself.

That is starting to change. In 2024, a team of French scientists was able to remotely monitor a major event on the border between the Australian and Antarctic plates, only two months after they installed equipment on the ocean floor. Their data shows that most of the spreading occurred in a relatively short time window, and some key events happened without any obvious seismic activity.

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US rare earths produced by Washington-backed companies are flowing to Japan and South Korea, as American demand has yet to materialize despite the Trump administration’s push to develop a national supply chain.

Rare earths products produced by MP Materials, Energy Fuels and Phoenix Tailings—which together have won billions of dollars in US government support—are being sold to companies in Asia, where the scale of magnet manufacturing remains larger than the nascent production in the US.

China’s lock on global supplies of rare earths and critical minerals has become a national security concern in the US and other Western nations, since Beijing started restricting access to them. The metals are crucial to 21st-century technology and are used in the manufacturing of everything from weapons guidance systems to electric vehicle batteries.

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Male dragonflies are known to engage in mid-air "dogfights" to defend their breeding territory, using different maneuvers than those they employ when hunting prey. A new paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface concluded that relatively simple rules drive that behavior, namely that male dragonflies are trying to maintain a tactical position. This mirrors the tactics of human fighter pilots. The research could lead to the development of smarter drones capable of navigating with simple, vision-based guidance rather than complex computation.

Classic pursuits involving prey or mating rituals are asymmetric: there is a chaser and an evader, with each role requiring different maneuvers. In the case of male-on-male interactions, however, it is more of a mutual pursuit, per the authors, who thought that studying flight trajectories of insects or raptors could yield useful insights into the guidance laws that underlie the behavior. They chose the Trithemis Aurora species of dragonfly for study because the males are "fiercely territorial," and there are usually multiple males around a given pond, intent on defending their chosen perches. The dragonflies are also crimson-colored, making them easier to track.

Much of the prior research on dragonfly interactions relied on visual observations or single-camera recordings. For this study, the authors set up a portable stereovideographic rig with two shutter-synchronized cameras to record dragonfly interactions in both color and monochrome, and then reconstructed 102 paired male-on-male flight trajectories to capture the 3D kinematics. They also reconstructed nine trajectories for dragonflies intercepting prey for comparative purposes. This enabled the authors to develop a model for the rules governing the flight behavior.

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Last week, just before the US started its break for the July Fourth holiday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed a new rule that would change how it regulated exposure to radiation. The Trump administration has been pushing to restart construction of nuclear power plants in the US, and many pro-nuclear advocates have been complaining about the US's existing regulations, portraying them as the main barrier to the flourishing of the industry. So, it had seemed likely that major revisions were coming.

Instead, the NRC's proposed new rules endorse the science behind its current rules and suggest that any problems are largely in the vagueness of the terminology that it has been using. So, instead, it's endorsing standards that are meant to accomplish the same thing, but avoid using some of the language it had relied on. Probably the clearest indication of the evolutionary change at play is that the NRC estimates the changing rules will save industry—not just power, but also medical and research applications—only about $9.5 million a year.

LNT and ALARA

There are two technical abbreviations at the center of US nuclear regulations. The first is LNT, which stands for "linear non-threshold." It's in reference to the issue of whether there's any level of radiation that is so low that it no longer produces harmful biological effects—the "threshold" in LNT. The "non-threshold" implies that it doesn't, and that's in keeping with biology, which has demonstrated that even single particles or photons of radiation can damage DNA and that the mechanisms cells have for repairing that damage are inherently error-prone. The "linear" in LNT simply describes how the impact of radiation scales directly with the dose.

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High above the remote Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the northernmost part of Australia, an air-launched rocket fired into space on Independence Day weekend to kick off a weekslong pursuit of a NASA astronomy satellite perilously close to falling out of orbit.

The endeavor to rescue NASA's Swift satellite is the first mission of its kind. NASA put out a call for commercial companies less than a year ago to propose how they could rapidly build and launch a small satellite to latch onto the Swift spacecraft and boost its altitude so that it doesn't come down in a few months.

Katalyst Space Technologies responded with the best offer. NASA awarded the company a contract last September to build and launch a mission to rescue Swift. A little more than nine months later, Katalyst's nearly half-ton Link satellite is safely in orbit. For anyone who follows the space industry, building, testing, and launching a functioning first-of-its-kind satellite of that size in less than a year is a remarkable achievement; it would usually take several years.

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