There have been numerous accounts in recent years of orcas ramming boats—and sometimes sinking them. Scientists believe this may be a form of culturally learned behavior passed down through generations. Now we have fresh examples: orcas in the Gulf of California were filmed teaming up to ram sunfish with so much force that the carcasses exploded into small fragments. While orcas have been known to use force to remove flesh from prey, this is something different, according to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Ethology.
“We think this may help younger orcas feed more easily, or it could also just be for fun," said co-author Kathryn Ayres of Beneath The Waves, a nonprofit organization promoting ocean health. "Orcas are known for playing with their food.”
Orcas engage in cooperative hunting strategies that can involve striking or killing animals—sometimes eating their prey, sometimes not—so the behavior could be described as social interaction, play, or practice as a mode of social learning. Orcas have been observed ramming whale sharks as another orca held the prey steady. Other cooperative strategies include herding mobile rays, blocking an escape path while hunting white sharks, and deliberately producing waves to bump penguins off ice floes.
© Robert Pittman, NOAA/Public domain
Although it’s commonly suspected that migratory birds fly in a ‘V’ formation due to this saving energy for the birds in the slipstream, understanding the exact aerodynamics behind this and how it affects the way that the birds use their wings to maintain this optimal pattern. After all, unlike airplanes and cars, our feathered avian dinosaur friends need to flap their wings if they want to have any chance of staving off plummeting back to Earth. Recent research by Brown University researchers now have provided a simulated model that answers many questions.
The major question was how this would work in the up- and down-wash zones created in this type of formation, with every bird following the lead bird dealing with the vortices created by the flapping of the wings of the bird before them. These wake vortices are quite complex, and thus required careful modelling to make sense of them.
As described in the paper by [Olivia Pomerenk] et al., the model is based on northern bald ibises, taking into account live-bird measurements for validation of the model. The main effect that can be observed is a reduced flapping amplitude, leading to an 11% energy savings for the birds in the leader’s wake.
The main advantage of having such a model is of course that it provides insight into the kinematic and aerodynamic mechanisms, meaning the ability to model virtual flocks of birds, predict the efficiency of specific in-flight configurations, and apply the lessons to swarms of drones, or whatever else we want to put in the air.
Microsoft is putting $60 million behind the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a push to use artificial intelligence to speed up scientific research across the government’s 17 national labs.
The company’s investment is split into two pieces: $40 million in Azure cloud computing and AI credits over three years, and $20 million for engineering and deployment help to get DOE researchers actually using the tools, Microsoft said in a blog post Wednesday.
Microsoft is also launching a new internal group called SPARK — Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge — to serve as the single point of contact between the company and DOE on Genesis Mission work. It’s meant to combine Microsoft’s program management, engineering, security and research teams into one coordinated effort, instead of leaving individual labs to navigate Microsoft on their own.
President Trump created the Genesis Mission through an executive order in November 2025, directing DOE to build a unified computing and data platform — since named the American Science and Security Platform — that connects the national labs’ supercomputers, AI tools and scientific datasets.
The order likened the effort’s urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project, and the White House said it’s expanded into a whole-of-government initiative involving more than 15 federal agencies, backed by more than $5 billion in commitments.
Microsoft named four initial projects taking shape under the partnership, including work with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., to speed up the discovery of new energy storage materials — cutting analysis that used to take years down to weeks — and autonomous lab work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aimed at detecting biological threats earlier.
“We move faster together,” Chris Barry, president of Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector business, wrote in the blog post announcing the commitment, framing the investment as both a “national security imperative” and economic opportunity for the U.S.
Microsoft isn’t the only Seattle-area cloud giant courting the Genesis Mission. Amazon Web Services was recognized by DOE as a Genesis Mission supporter in December, highlighting its work with Idaho National Laboratory on AI tools for nuclear reactor design, and the company launched its own Genesis Accelerator Initiative in February, offering up to $50 million in cloud credits for DOE-related research over three years.
Google also announced Wednesday that it was committing $40 million of AI tokens and cloud credits for researchers in support of the Genesis Mission.
A photon is a single particle of light, and under normal circumstances, it can't be divided. But a photon is also not a particle, in the sense that it does not have a specific location. Instead, it is an extended object.
So if a photon is only partway through the process of reflecting from a perfect mirror and you yank the mirror away, what happens? The answer, from a trio of Norwegian physicists, turns out (arxiv.org link) to be more complex than I expected.
Let’s first talk briefly about dividing and combining photons. If this were a common experience in our lives, then shining a single color of light through a piece of glass or reflecting it from a surface might cause photons to divide or combine. This would lead to an amazing array of colors: Our universe would be the most fantastic and legal LSD trip you could imagine. But this doesn't generally happen, hence LSD.
© DrPixel
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. It's one of the most famous natural disasters in human history, so naturally there have been countless documentaries about Pompeii (and at least one popular song). But only one features actor Tom Hiddleston taking on the role of a "time detective" to bring the people of Pompeii to vivid life. That would be National Geographic's new three-part docuseries, Pompeii: Out of Time.
The Marvel connection made Out of Time happen. Executive producer Kevin Wright was also a producer on the Disney+ series Loki, which included a scene where Hiddleston's Loki travels through time to visit Pompeii. Hiddleston also studied classics at Cambridge University and had visited the Pompeii archaeological site as a teenager, which the Marvel star attributes to indirectly influencing his career path into acting.
"There is just a passion to the way Tom tells stories that's infectious," Wright told Ars. "We knew that if we could capture that and put it into [the series], it might interest people who wouldn't normally want to watch a documentary about Pompeii. "
© National Geographic/Paolo Verzone
Naked mole rats are weird. They spend their lives almost entirely underground, are largely insensitive to some kinds of pain, can persist without oxygen for a long time, rarely develop cancer, and can live past 30 years, which is decades longer than similarly sized rodents. They are also eusocial, like ants, bees, or termites—in a colony that can hold more than a hundred animals, only one female, the queen, breeds.
We didn’t know how exactly naked mole-rat queens stop other females from breeding. For a long time, our leading hypothesis was bullying and violence, but that may be a bit impractical, given their kingdoms are vast networks of tunnels that can stretch for up to three kilometers. But now a team of Lewin Lab scientists at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin discovered it’s actually just one part of a sophisticated olfactory signaling program.
"It's very clear that mole rats actually have quite big noses and smell a lot," says Gary Lewin, a neurobiologist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and senior author of the study. Naked mole rats have around 1200 olfactory receptor genes, more than mice (which have roughly 1,000 of them) and way more than the few hundred in humans. They're also blind. "They have to be able to navigate and move around without vision, so smell is one of those things that’s enhanced," Lewin said.
© imageBROKER/Eric Isselee
Although life tends to find a way, something first has to kickstart said lifeforms. Exactly how the first biological cells formed on Earth – and potentially on other worlds – remains an enduring mystery. Some theories point to the early Earth’s surface conditions as a viable laboratory for the self-assembly of the first viable membranes, RNA, DNA and associated molecular machinery, while seeding of the Earth’s primitive atmosphere by sugars and other precursors from asteroids and kin is required in other theories.
Recently [Izaskun Jiménez-Serra] et al. added to this debate with the reported detection of four-carbon sugars in the form of erythrulose in the interstellar medium. Using the 40 meter radio telescope at Yebes and the 30 meter radio telescope at Granada the signatures of this sugar was detected in a molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way.
These sugars likely form on these interstellar dust grains from more basic two-carbon aldehydes and alcohols, with them providing conceivably a source of energy for early metabolic processes of developing lifeforms. This specific type of sugar is highly prevalent in Earth’s fruits, and thus its prevalence in interstellar space is at the very least an interesting coincidence, if not another puzzle piece in the overarching question of abiogenesis.
It seems as though $5.6 billion wasn't enough. That was the news from the US Space Force on Friday, when military officials announced they were tripling the maximum value of one of the service's National Security Space Launch contracts to $17 billion.
The expansion of the Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 contract comes as the Pentagon signals rising demand for military satellite launches. The NSSL program is set up to allow Space Systems Command, which oversees the Space Force's launch program, to select from a pool of launch providers for individual missions to deliver the military's satellites to orbit.
The NSSL program has two parts. Lane 1 covers the Space Force's more risk-tolerant missions, such as medium-lift launches with experimental payloads or rideshare missions carrying satellites for the Pentagon's surveillance or data relay constellations. Lane 2 includes higher-priority strategic missions, like the government's largest and most expensive spy satellites, or radiation-hardened communications satellites designed to survive a nuclear war.
© SpaceX
It seems as though $5.6 billion wasn't enough. That was the news from the US Space Force on Friday, when military officials announced they were tripling the maximum value of one of the service's National Security Space Launch contracts to $17 billion.
The expansion of the Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 contract comes as the Pentagon signals rising demand for military satellite launches. The NSSL program is set up to allow Space Systems Command, which oversees the Space Force's launch program, to select from a pool of launch providers for individual missions to deliver the military's satellites to orbit.
The NSSL program has two parts. Lane 1 covers the Space Force's more risk-tolerant missions, such as medium-lift launches with experimental payloads or rideshare missions carrying satellites for the Pentagon's surveillance or data relay constellations. Lane 2 includes higher-priority strategic missions, like the government's largest and most expensive spy satellites, or radiation-hardened communications satellites designed to survive a nuclear war.
© SpaceX
Login