Stories by Joseph Howlett

Observations by the Mars Express orbiter reveal rapid changes on the Red Planet’s surface from windblown volcanic ash

Artemis II’s safe return from lunar orbit sparks a debate over the costs, climate effects and long‑term value of going back to the moon

The Artemis II mission’s 10-day odyssey around the moon and back was captured in stunning photographs at every moment. Here are 12 of our favorite images

The Artemis II spacecraft is due to splash down on April 10, and NASA officials and the astronauts onboard are gearing up for that return

After decades of planning, NASA’s Artemis program is giving astronomers their long-awaited moonshot

The astronauts of Artemis II phoned home—and the International Space Station—between stretches of well-earned rest on day seven of the mission

Artemis II’s sixth day was a whirlwind of science and awe, with the mission’s astronauts glimpsing parts of the moon never before seen by any human—and talking to the U.S. president

NASA officials and the Artemis II crew are starting to prepare in earnest for Monday’s lunar flyby—while also trying to fix the mission’s toilet

Friday is the Artemis II mission’s third official day as it makes a 10-day journey around the moon and back

The Orion spacecraft just completed its last planned major fuel burn, setting its course for the rest of its 10-day journey around the moon and back

A new archeological finding shows that Native Americans were exploring probability through games of chance far earlier than their Old World counterparts

The four astronauts onboard the Orion spacecraft will carry out a packed schedule during their trip around the moon’s far side

Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard, winners of the latest Turing Award, spent their lives touting the advantages of the quantum world

More than 1,500 mathematicians are demanding that their field’s most prestigious meeting be moved from the U.S.

A new challenge reveals how well AI can tackle true math problems

The decades since scientists confirmed the first planet around another star have been rich in discovery, but it’s rare to see a new solar system as it forms

The Mordell conjecture—now known as Faltings’s theorem—concerns the number of special points on a curve

The stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud aren’t behaving the way they should. A cataclysmic collision with another nearby galaxy may be the culprit

By plying its ground-penetrating radar in the depths of Mars’s Jezero Crater, this rover has found even older deltas buried beneath those seen on the surface from space

First Proof is an effort to see whether LLMs can contribute meaningfully to pure mathematics research. The dust has settled on round one, and the results are surprising

A new study explains how some supernovae are particularly dazzling—the glow from a magnetic, spinning ball of neutrons called a magnetar. An assist from Einstein is what settled the case

Why measles cases are rising in the U.S., how artificial intelligence is shaping warfare, and what accelerated global warming means for the world

A team at IBM Research has assembled a strange new ring-shaped molecule that bends around like a more complicated Möbius strip

This weekend will offer a chance to see a rare celestial event—Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all aligned in the sky like beads on a string