The Download: How America lost its lead in the hunt for alien life, and ambitious battery claims

In July 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover came across a peculiar rocky outcrop on Mars covered in strange spots. On Earth, these marks are almost always produced by microbial life.

Sure, those specks are not definitive proof of alien life. But they are the best hint yet that life may not be a one-off event in the cosmos.

But the only way to know for sure is to bring a sample of that rock home to study.

Now, just over a year and a half later, the project to do so is on life support, with zero funding flowing in 2026 and little backing left in Congress. As a result, those oh-so-promising rocks may be stuck out there forever.

This also means that, in the race to find evidence of alien life, America has effectively ceded its pole position to its greatest geopolitical rival: China. The superpower is moving full steam ahead with its own version of the mission to bring the rock samples home. It’s leaner than America and Europe’s mission, and the rock samples it will snatch from Mars will likely not be as high quality. But that won’t be the headline people remember—the one in the scientific journals and the history books.

Nearly a dozen project insiders and scientists in both the US and China shared with me the story of how America blew its lead in the new space race. It’s full of wild dreams and promising discoveries—as well as mismanagement, eye-watering costs, and, ultimately, anger and disappointment. Read the full story.

—Robin George Andrews

This article is also part of the Big Story series: MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting. The stories in the series take a deep look at the technologies that are coming next and what they will mean for us and the world we live in. Check out the rest of them here.

This company claims a battery breakthrough. Now they need to prove it.

When a company claims to have created what’s essentially the holy grail of batteries, there are bound to be some questions.

Interest has been swirling since Donut Lab, a Finnish company, announced last month that it had a new solid-state battery technology, one that was ready for large-scale production. The company said its batteries can charge super-fast and have a high energy density that would translate to ultra-long-range EVs. What’s more, it claimed the cells can operate safely in the extreme heat and cold, contain “green and abundant materials,” and would cost less than lithium-ion batteries do today.