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SpaceX launched its huge Starship rocket on the program's eighth test flight Thursday, but a malfunction of some sort triggered multiple upper stage engine shutdowns and the vehicle failed to reach its planned sub-orbital altitude, breaking apart in a spectacular shower of debris.

It was the second failure in a row for a Starship upper stage, a vehicle critical to NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon in the next few years.

"During Starship's ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost. Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses," SpaceX said in a statement.

"We will review the data from today's flight test to better understand root cause. As always, success comes from what we learn, and today's flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship's reliability."

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An ancient cat was found almost perfectly preserved in Siberia's permafrost.

Researchers found the mummy of a 35,000-year-old saber-toothed cub in what is now Russia's northeastern Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia, in 2020. A study published this past week in the journal Scientific Reports shows that the cat was just three weeks old when it died, but its cause of death is unknown.

The kitten still had its whiskers and claws attached when it was pulled out of the permafrost, and was covered in a coat of "short, thick, soft, dark brown fur." Its hair was about 20 to 30 millimeters long, according to researchers.

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Scientists in Bolivia are hoping to track glacial changes at lightning speed.

What if the song "Baby Shark" stopped after just two stanzas?

For non-fans of the catchy tune, that might sound like a dream. For a real-life Mommy Shark in Illinois, it's reality: She produced a baby without a Daddy Shark.

The epaulette shark pup hatched this summer at Brookfield Zoo, just west of Chicago. Its mother has been at the zoo since 2019; in that time, she's never shared a tank with a male.

It's a rare case of parthenogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction, according to the zoo.

The latest species of spider found in the U.S. are huge, brightly colored and travel in a method described as "ballooning." And, according to new research, they're spreading out to new states around the country.

Researchers at Clemson University published a study on Joro spiders, coming to the conclusion that the species is spreading rapidly beyond the South Carolina area, and data shows they could inhabit most of the eastern U.S.

Scientists have reconstructed Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall by eavesdropping on people’s brainwaves – the first time a recognisable song has been decoded from recordings of electrical brain activity.

The hope is that doing so could ultimately help to restore the musicality of natural speech in patients who struggle to communicate because of disabling neurological conditions such as stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the neurodegenerative disease that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.

Although members of the same laboratory had previously managed to decipher speech – and even silently imagined words – from brain recordings, “in general, all of these reconstruction attempts have had a robotic quality”, said Prof Robert Knight, a neurologist at the University of California in Berkeley, US, who conducted the study with the postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier.

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