2026’s historic snow drought is bad news for the West
Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early.…
Tech
Here is NASA’s plan for nuking Gateway and sending it to Mars
NASA’s announcement Tuesday that it will “pause” work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying…
Antibiotic resistance among germs swells during droughts, study suggests
For as long as we’ve known that soil bacteria manufacture molecular weapons to fight each other, we’ve been swiping their battle plans. In clinics and hospitals, those turf-war weapons have…
Ukraine’s military brings exoskeletons to the front line
After over four years of war, Ukraine’s military says it’s testing an exoskeleton in the field that can help soldiers more easily load artillery and run at speeds of up…
Trump staffs science and technology panel with non-scientists
PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is generally not a high-profile group. It tends to be noticed when things go wrong, such as when the PCAST…
Google bumps up Q Day deadline to 2029, far sooner than previously thought
Google is dramatically shortening its readiness deadline for the arrival of Q Day, the point at which existing quantum computers can break public-key cryptography algorithms that secure decades’ worth of…
Japan makes breakthrough in dirty diaper recycling
Earth has a big diaper problem. Families in the United States toss out over 1 trillion of the soiled garments every year, making it the third most common consumer product…
How chemists turned bourbon waste into supercapacitors
Bourbon is a multi-billion-dollar market, but the American barrel-aged whiskey also produces a lot of wasted grain at distilleries. Chemists at the University of Kentucky developed a method to transform…
Mushy bourbon sludge recycled into battery electrodes
It’s generally not a great idea to mix bourbon with high-voltage electricity. That said, chemists at the University of Kentucky discovered a potentially powerful use for one of whiskey’s most…
Houston city bus listed on Facebook Marketplace
You can find a lot of random things for sale on Facebook Marketplace: vintage collectibles, oversized teeth in a suitcase, and even a World War I shipwreck. Now bargain hunters…