John Timmer

By now, many readers are familiar with SpaceX's Starship tests. The rocket makes its way skyward and performs maneuvers that seem like impossibilities to a generation raised on...

On Monday, the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Lab released a report entitled "Halfway to Zero," referring to a goal of a zero-emission US electric grid. The report's...

Is it safe to open schools? From the moment it became clear that the COVID-19 pandemic had set up shop in the US, answers to that question have been scrutinized, analyzed, and even...

In general, obesity is linked with a large range of health problems—for most people, at least. But for a substantial minority of those who are overweight, obesity is...

Early on in D-Wave's history, the company made bold claims about its quantum annealer outperforming algorithms run on traditional CPUs. Those claims turned out to be premature, as...

Texas is now entering its third day of widespread power outages and, although supplies of electricity are improving, they remain well short of demand. For now, the state's power...

What are the key differences between modern humans and our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans? For the Neanderthals, there doesn't look to be any sort of obvious...

Building a better battery requires dealing with problems in materials science, chemistry, and manufacturing. We do regular coverage of work going on in the former two categories, but...

For applications like robotics, there's usually a clear division of labor between the processors that control the robot's body and the actuators that actually control the physical...

Most of the disposable batteries you'll come across are technically termed alkaline batteries. They work at high pH and typically use zinc as the charge carrier. Zinc is great...