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The Download: how America lost its lead in the hunt for alien life, and ambitious battery claims

In July 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover came across a peculiar rocky outcrop on Mars covered in strange spots. On Earth, these marks are almost always produced by microbial life. Sure, those specks... Read more »

This company claims a battery breakthrough. Now they need to prove it.

It sounded amazing—this sort of technology could transform the EV industry. But many quickly wondered if it was all too good to be true. Now, Donut Lab is releasing a series of... Read more »

America was winning the race to find Martian life. Then China jumped in.

Two messages were encoded on the 70-foot parachute used by the Perseverance rover as it descended toward Mars. This annotated image shows how NASA systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code... Read more »

Roundtables: Why 2026 Is the Year for Sodium-Ion Batteries

Listen to the session or watch below Sodium-based batteries could be a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium-ion, and the technology is finally making its way into cars—and energy storage arrays on the... Read more »

The Download: introducing the Crime issue

Technology has long made crime and its prosecution a game of cat and mouse. But those same new technologies that have allowed crime to outpace law have also reenergized law enforcement and... Read more »

Now is a good time for doing crime

You have to remember, this was before all of us lived with a constant rain of text messages and emails designed to elicit the information necessary to pull something like this off.... Read more »

3 things Juliet Beauchamp is into right now

The only reality show that matters The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is one of the best shows on television right now. Not one of the best reality TV shows, but... Read more »

Listen to Earth’s rumbling, secret soundtrack

House’s album is art, but scientists made it possible. Barometers picked up the 1883 eruption of the South Pacific volcano Krakatoa as far away as London. And today, a global network of... Read more »

Innovation on the move

Choe in particular has been at the center of this push as the agency’s chief of staff since 2023, a position in which she took the lead in revamping organizational culture. She... Read more »

Using big data for good

Darwin’s Ark broadened its focus to cats in 2024, and while it’s too soon for any results, even the research methods are proving interesting. The usual way to extract DNA from a... Read more »