The planetary science community’s response to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s announcement at an event called “Ignition” in early April 2026 that the agency planned to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars by December 2028 ranged from shock to mild alarm. Planetary scientist Vicky Hamilton of the Southwest Research Institute put…

Bitcoin first surpassed $120,000 in July 2025. The timing wasn’t coincidental. US lawmakers were getting ready to discuss legislation that would establish federal regulations for digital assets for the first time. The market reacted to the regulatory momentum as a sign of legitimacy, which is how cryptocurrency markets typically react…

During a widely publicized interview at a tech conference in the summer of 2023, Linda Yaccarino calmly argued that X was a platform that advertisers could rely on. She had only been working there for a few weeks. According to most accounts, she was a seasoned media executive with real…

The silence in a department store that is closing has a certain quality. The glass cases, the carpeted aisles, and the overhead lighting humming over dwindling inventory are all still in place. Final discounts are marked with encouraging red numbers on signs. A few workers are standing close to registers…

Something changes around the third or fourth time someone opens their banking app and sees a charge they truly can’t place—$14.99 from something called Paramount+, perhaps, or $9.99 for a fitness app they downloaded during a short, hopeful January. For an increasing number of people, the mild annoyance that once…

The wild beehives on the large kapok trees in the northwest Amazon have been declining for years, somewhere along the rivers that cut through Kofan and Waorani territory. If the bees are present at all, the honey harvests that once filled buckets now fill spoons. Recently, two guests showed up…

The ground has been rising for decades in the port town of Pozzuoli, just west of Naples. Not drastically, not in a way that would cause people to flee into the streets on any given Tuesday, but consistently, quantifiably, and with an accumulation that is now hard to ignore. The…

Imagine a woman in Lagos browsing through an Android wallet app while seated in a tiny store selling airtime and phone accessories. In the last year, the value of the local currency has dropped by a third. The price of cooking oil and the cost of late school fees are…

Odin, a small unmanned spacecraft, took off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early on February 27, 2025. NASA was not involved in the mission. There was no live broadcast with a countdown clock on every television network, and there were no throngs of…

A family was having dinner in the San Fernando Valley on an August evening in 2020 when their lights went out. There isn’t a storm outside. The street is free of downed wires. The grid operator in California made the slow, deliberate decision to cut power to over 800,000 homes…

In the spring of 2019, Jeff Bezos made what appeared to be a fairly typical billionaire-in-space announcement while standing in front of a model of a moon lander at a media event in Washington. A lunar lander was being constructed by Blue Origin. It would transport goods. People, eventually. In…

When a homeowner answered the door in a peaceful Scottsdale, Arizona neighborhood early on January 31, she saw two young men in delivery uniforms carrying a package and a dolly. Nothing out of the ordinary. Deliveries arrive on Saturday mornings in the Sweetwater Ranch area, and no one seems to…