Stories by Sam Macdonald

The Psyche spacecraft flew by Mars earlier this year on its way to a metal-rich asteroid, capturing the images along the way

A new breakthrough pushes the limits of randomness, bringing a decades-old mathematical mystery closer to resolution

Several children who had aggressive recurrent brain tumors remained disease-free years after this treatment, according to an early-stage trial

An ancient sample shows calcite threading through this material’s cracks and pores, offering possible lessons for making modern concrete last longer

A rare eruption in the Indian Ocean let researchers capture one of the clearest views yet of a seafloor spreading event

The exoplanet telescope TESS revealed a distant world using an entirely different detection method than the one it was built around

The space agency has put out a call for its Moon & Mars Exploration Analog, which recreates the challenges of a long-duration space mission

Astronomers have for the first time observed an atmosphere around a giant planet orbiting a white dwarf

A new decision rules that geofence warrants are Fourth Amendment searches, but it stops short of banning police access to location histories

Training people to pay attention to the right visual cues nearly doubled how accurately they could spot AI-generated faces

The discovery of a completely new type of gravitational wave could reveal what happens near a black hole’s event horizon

A new study captures how cork, wine and air interact over time

Astronomers may have found the remains of two long-dead stellar siblings

A galaxy appears to be missing the invisible substance thought to hold such objects together, further challenging long-held assumptions about how galaxies form

Researchers have created the first high-resolution global map of the extent of one of Earth’s largest—and least visible—living networks