Ernest Shackleton

On February 18, 2021, a car-sized robot parachuted its way down to the surface of Mars to begin searching for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet. From that day on, the landing site where NASA’s Perseverance rover plopped down became known as Octavia E. Butler, named after the prolific science fiction author behind many famous titles such as Parable of the Sower.Astronomers Could Soon Get Warnings When SpaceX Satellites Threaten Their ViewEver since NASA began sending rovers to Mars, the space agency has had a…

A team of archaeologists from eight nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea has come together to scrutinize shipwrecks sitting at the bottom of the water body sitting between them.Giving Optimus Prime a Proper Back Story | io9 InterviewThe researchers hail from Algeria, Croatia, Egypt, France, Italy, Morocco, Spain, and Tunisia, and on their recent mission, coordinated by UNESCO, they found three new shipwrecks. One wreck dates to between 100 BCE and 200 CE and two date from around the turn of the 20th century. The…

The RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sunk to the bottom of the Northern Atlantic Ocean in April 1912, killing more than 1,500 passengers and crew. Now, researchers have gotten an unprecedented look at the entire ship on the seafloor, by creating a digital scan of the wreck from hundreds of thousands of photos.Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard Nerd Out About Jurassic Park's Returning HeroesThe BBC reportsthat deep-sea mapping company Magellan Limited carried out the fieldwork in the summer of 2022…

The stern of the shipwreck Endurance.Photo: Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust/National GeographicCompiling a list of the top archaeological finds in a given year is always a weird exercise in time dilation. I’m tasked with revisiting past lives through the art, shipwrecks, and bones left behind. Some items on this list were lost for merely a century; others for millennia. No matter how old they are, though, they’re all relegated to a relativistic ‘then’—a world that’s well and truly gone, except for these tantalizing…