The world's only dark sky airport sits inside a national park Visitors at Jackson Hole Airport can spot the Milky Way from the parking lot. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Airports aren't typically known for being the best places to view the night sky. But last spring, the Jackson Hole Airport in Wyoming became the first airport in the world to become certified as an International Dark Sky Place, thanks to a community committed to night sky preservation. Here's how they did it, why it matters, and how it's still as safe to fly into as any other airport (because we know you were wondering).

Science Space Deep Space Amazon's 180 internet satellites are already too bright. A new study determined 92% of Amazon Leo's satellites may currently impede research. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Amazon is racing to catch up to Starlink in the battle for satellite internet dominance, and it's creating problems for everyone else. Only 180 of the proposed 3,236 Amazon Leo satellites are currently in low Earth orbit, but they're already routinely bright enough to disrupt astronomical research, according to a forthcoming study .

This month's full moon will come within about 222,000 miles of Earth. The supermoon rises from the sea in Molfetta, Italy, on October 7, 2025. It was the first of three consecutive supermoons in 2025. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. As the year's penultimate month kicks off, the year's brightest supermoon is almost here.

This long-duration comet will make its closest approach to Earth this fall, before disappearing into the outer solar system for another 1,000 years. Comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6) photographed in Texas in late September 2025. It was early January 2025 when a faint light spot was observed at the Mt. Follow-up observations revealed that the object was a comet visiting from the outer edge of the solar system, and it was named Comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6). Its "period"--the time it takes to complete its lengthy orbit of the sun--is about 1,350 years.

Planetary scientists can now predict when the aurora will shine over our cosmic neighbor. An artist's impression of how the aurora might appear in the sky above the Perseverance rover. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Just like Earth, our cosmic neighbor Mars sometimes has auroras dance across its night sky. In March 2024, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover imaged visible-light auroras for the first time during a major solar flare and coronal mass ejection.

Elon Musk has made light of the latest SpaceX test, which ended with the enormous rocket exploding on the launch pad. While footage showed Starship bursting into a gigantic ball of fire, Musk claimed that this was'just a scratch.' The Starship 36 rocket was undergoing a static fire test at SpaceX's Starbase test site at around 11pm last night, when its nose suddenly burst open. Within seconds, a giant ball of fire could be seen spreading on the ground as black clouds of smoke reached up to the night sky. The static fire test is a pre-flight procedure in which a rocket engine or a set of engines are ignited while the vehicle is firmly bolted to the launch mount, meaning the rocket was not set to launch Wednesday night when the explosion occurred. In a statement, SpaceX said the rocket suffered'a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase.

An elderly grandmother who chats about knitting patterns, recipes for scones and the blackness of the night sky to anyone who will listen has become an unlikely tool in combatting scammers. Like many people, "Daisy" is beset with countless calls from fraudsters, who often try to take control of her computer after claiming she has been hacked. But because of her dithering and inquiries about whether they like cups of tea, the criminals end up furious and frustrated rather than successful. Daisy is, of course, not a real grandmother but an AI bot created by computer scientists to combat fraud. Her task is simply to waste the time of the people who are trying to scam her.

At first, in mid-November, the mysterious lights were seen blinking across the night skies of New Jersey. Reports of incandescent flying objects were logged in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Bystanders in Virginia Beach said they saw an aircraft "unlike any other they've seen". Sightings have now come from as far afield as Louisiana, Florida and Arizona. People across the US are looking up.

While LLMs have shown impressive capabilities in solving math or coding problems, the ability to make scientific discoveries remains a distinct challenge. This paper proposes a "Turing test for an AI scientist" to assess whether an AI agent can conduct scientific research independently, without relying on human-generated knowledge. Drawing inspiration from the historical development of science, we propose seven benchmark tests that evaluate an AI agent's ability to make groundbreaking discoveries in various scientific domains. These tests include inferring the heliocentric model from celestial observations, discovering the laws of motion in a simulated environment, deriving the differential equation governing vibrating strings, inferring Maxwell's equations from electrodynamics simulations, inventing numerical methods for initial value problems, discovering Huffman coding for data compression, and developing efficient sorting algorithms. To ensure the validity of these tests, the AI agent is provided with interactive libraries or datasets specific to each problem, without access to human knowledge that could potentially contain information about the target discoveries. The ultimate goal is to create an AI scientist capable of making novel and impactful scientific discoveries, surpassing the best human experts in their respective fields. These "Turing tests" serve as intermediate milestones, assessing the AI agent's ability to make discoveries that were groundbreaking in their time. If an AI agent can pass the majority of these seven tests, it would indicate significant progress towards building an AI scientist, paving the way for future advancements in autonomous scientific discovery. This paper aims to establish a benchmark for the capabilities of AI in scientific research and to stimulate further research in this exciting field.

This research endeavors to address the pervasive issue of light pollution through an interdisciplinary approach, leveraging data science and machine learning techniques. By analyzing extensive datasets and research findings, we aim to develop predictive models capable of estimating the degree of sky glow observed in various locations and times. Our research seeks to inform evidence-based interventions and promote responsible outdoor lighting practices to mitigate the adverse impacts of light pollution on ecosystems, energy consumption, and human well-being.