February 27, 2025 4 min read Crab Memes Amplify Mistaken Ideas about Evolution Memes about repeated evolution of crabs have been co-opted to joke about technology and “ultimate forms.” They’re hilarious, but they oversimplify natural variation, giving bad arguments a scientific veneer By Joanna Wolfe edited by Dan Vergano Lee Foong Lee/Alamy Stock Photo You’ve…
An artist’s impression of the solar system Shutterstock/Vadim Sadovski All of our solar system’s planets are lining up in the night sky at once this week. This extraordinary celestial event will see the sky scattered with seven visible planets in what is known as a great planetary alignment, or a “planetary parade”. The eight planets…
SpaceX has pushed the eighth test flight of its Starship megarocket back a few days. Elon Musk’s company had been targeting Friday (Feb. 28) for Flight 8 of Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. But that’s no longer the plan. “Now targeting to launch Starship’s eighth flight test as soon as Monday,…
As the hunt for dark matter, the universe’s most common yet most mysterious “stuff,” continues, scientists are understandably eager to get the most powerful space telescope in on the action. Space.com spoke to three scientists, cosmic detectives who are hot on the trail of dark matter candidates using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The…
If all goes to plan, two NASA missions called “SPHEREx” and “PUNCH” will be sharing a ride to space very soon. The agency plans to launch both missions at the same time no earlier than Sunday (March 2) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket; liftoff is scheduled to occur from Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg…
Remote cameras in Norway have given us the first detailed look at polar bear cubs emerging from their dens, in videos more than 10 years in the making. The first months of a polar bear (Ursus maritimus) cub’s life are spent in a den of ice, where the warm bodies of their mother and siblings…
When you look at your surrounding environment, it might seem like you’re living on a flat plane. After all, this is why you can navigate a new city using a map: a flat piece of paper that represents all the places around you. This is likely why some people in the past believed the Earth…
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A new SpaceX rocket launched a pristine batch of Starlink internet satellites into orbit late Wednesday (Feb. 26) in a dazzling nighttime liftoff. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 21 Starlink satellites soared into the night time sky from a SpaceX’s Launch Complex-40, at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Florida….
Imagine floating in space, gazing on a frozen white orb. The ball hangs in the void, lonely and gleaming in the light from its star. From pole to equator, the sphere is covered in a thick crust of ice. In orbit around the white planet is a single cratered moon. You are gazing on Earth…
Heat takes it out of you. After a long, hot day, we feel tired and grumpy. But sustained periods of heat do more than that – they age us faster. Cumulative heat stress changes our epigenetics – how our cells turn on or off gene switches in response to environmental pressure. Now, new research from…