A drone that paints over graffiti has been launched in Washington state under a new pilot program, according to a press release from the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). And if the new spray drones succeed, one could easily imagine other municipalities across the country embracing drones for…
Pitch-black darkness. Crushing squeezes, muddy passages, icy waterfalls. Bats and spiders. Abseiling over ledges into the unknown. How far would you go for a fossil? On a two-year retrieval mission of nearly 60 hours in an underground cave, we met our limits—and went beyond.
This story is part of our Chief Innovation Officer Forecast series with Quartz, a business report from the front lines of the future.
Bird flu isn’t just lurking inside cows, new research shows. Florida scientists have reported the first known case of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in a common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). Though the case dates back to 2022, it’s the latest indication that these flu strains can potentially infect…
A baseball player may tap his helmet three times before stepping up to the plate, and an Argentina supporter may burn incense in front of a portrait of Diego Maradona as the Albiceleste kick off. Now, a team of archaeologists have found evidence that the ancient Maya blessed their ball courts with ritual offerings, an…
This week, Russia unsurprisingly vetoed a draft resolution to prevent the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit. Russia’s rejection of the United Nations resolution is not a clear indication that it possesses orbital arsenal that could destroy satellite constellations, but it shows the country is not wavering under…
The Atacama Desert—an arid, unpopulated swath of northern Chile that is home to some of the most perceptive ground telescopes on Earth—is actually teeming with life beneath the ground, according to a team of researchers that recently scrutinized its soils.
Jupiter and its moons are a diverse and dynamic subdivision of our solar system’s neighborhood, one that NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been visiting since 2016. Besides hosting the system’s largest planet, at over 300 times the mass of our own planet, the Jovian system includes 95 known moons, the largest of which are…
China’s space station crew carried out two spacewalks this past winter to repair the solar wings attached to the core module, which had been damaged by space debris.
