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Do you take after your dad’s RNA?
On a bright afternoon in Jiangsu, China, Xin Yin is playing personal trainer to some mice. One by one, he sets the rodents on a miniature treadmill that starts slow and gradually speeds up. These littermates are born athletes, able to run farther with less lactic acid buildup than average laboratory mice. The secret to
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Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab make a breakthrough in rotor technology
Engineer Jaakko Karras inspects a next-generation Mars helicopter rotor blade prior to testing it at supersonic speeds in the 25-foot Space Simulator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in November 2025. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Engineer Jaakko Karras inspects a next-generation Mars helicopter rotor blade prior to testing it at supersonic speeds in the 25-foot Space Simulator at
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Manufacturing qubits that can move
Like any other manufactured chip, the wiring that connects the quantum dots is locked into place during the chip’s manufacture. Since different error correction schemes require different connections among the qubits, this forces us to commit to specific error-correction schemes during manufacturing. If a better scheme is developed after a chip is made, it’s probably
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RIP social media. What comes next is messy.
Last fall, we featured an extensive interview with Petter Törnberg of the University of Amsterdam, who studies the underlying mechanisms of social media that give rise to its worst aspects: the partisan echo chambers, the concentration of influence among a small group of elite users (attention inequality), and the amplification of the most extreme divisive
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SpaceX is starting to move on from the world’s most successful rocket
It is far too soon to mention retirement, but astute observers of the space industry have noticed SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket is not launching as often as it used to. The decline is modest so far, and it does not signal any problem at SpaceX or with the Falcon 9. Rather, it is a
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MIT’s virtual violin offers luthiers a new design tool
The construction of a violin. The construction of a violin. Credit: Sotakeit/CC BY-SA 3.0 Or perhaps it was the varnish Stradivari used: a cocktail of honey, egg whites, and gum arabic. A 2022 study involving nanoscale imaging of two such instruments revealed a protein-based layer at the interface of the wood and the varnish, which
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Trump administration cites national security in stalling 165 wind farms
The wind farms could generate 30 gigawatts, enough to power 15 million homes. Letters sent to developers in early April said the agency was reviewing its processes for evaluating energy projects’ impact on national security. The moves represent a dramatic escalation of the administration’s effort to shut down wind energy in the US, reaching for
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Rocket Report: Falcon Heavy is back; Russia’s Soyuz-5 finally debuts
Welcome to Edition 8.39 of the Rocket Report! There’s a lot of news to share in the universe of powerful rockets this week, and we’re delighted to sum it up in this week’s edition. The biggest rocket of them all, Starship, had a relatively quiet week as SpaceX aims to launch the vehicle’s next test
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Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed
DOI: Physics of Fluids, 2026. 10.1103/tnxb-ckr5  (About DOIs). Tracking Roman shipwreck repairs Credit: Adriboats © L. Damelet, CNRS/CCJ Credit: Adriboats © L. Damelet, CNRS/CCJ Back in 2016, archaeologists discovered a shipwreck from the Roman Republic, the Ilovik–Paržine 1. The wreck has been the subject of much study of the actual ship, enabling scientists to determine
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Scorpions go terminator mode and reinforce their weapons with metal
One idea the team floats is that zinc and manganese are limited resources, so scorpions can only reinforce the most critical parts of the stingers instead of spreading the metals across their entire exoskeleton. Going deeper into the reasons behind what appears to be a design flaw in an otherwise neatly built stinger is one
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