Michael Greshko

Feb 12, 2025 | nytimes.com | Michael Greshko

Carole Kamin first walked through the doors of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1975 after taking a job as a buyer for the Pittsburgh museum's gift shop. Awe-struck by the fossils on display, she would style herself as a "dinosaur queen" for the next 20 years. She sourced dino-patterned fabric from India for barbecue aprons. She worked with a toy manufacturer to produce models of the museum's ancient creatures.

Jan 15, 2025 | scientificamerican.com | Michael Greshko

In the classic country ballad “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a cowboy receives a frightening vision: the devil’s herd of cows thundering through the clouds, chased by the souls of cowpokes who must “ride forever on that range up in the sky / on horses snorting fire.” At 1:11 A.M. EST on January 15 Blue Ghost, a lunar lander built by the Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace, rode its own fiery steed through the heavens, launching atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on a mission to become just the...

Jan 7, 2025 | science.org | Paul Voosen |Michael Greshko |Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

NASA is considering two options for the shape of its reworked mission to collect rock samples from the surface of Mars and rocket them to Earth, the agency announced today. Either one would cut billions from the original mission’s cost and speed its development. But the agency will leave the choice to the incoming administration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. The decision reflects both technical and political reality, Bill Nelson, NASA’s outgoing administrator, said in a press briefing.

Dec 10, 2024 | scientificamerican.com | Michael Greshko

With its Artemis program, NASA aims to return humans to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. And on the eve of a new presidential administration, agency officials have announced both a delay to the program’s next major mission and their intent to make that mission more ambitious in scope.

Nov 18, 2024 | aarp.org | Michael Greshko

“Taking an idea, putting it as a design, and actually having a physical item as a finished product makes me feel like I’m building things again,” the second trial participant said in a post on Neuralink’s website. Neuralink is just one of many private businesses and university research labs developing new BCI technologies, and others are working to improve brain implants we already have.