All the things that surround us and make us up weren’t always here. But where did it all come from? The Universe, as we see it today, sure is full of […]

We all share atoms with every person, living or dead, on Earth. There’s more in common among us than you might think. When you eat food, drink liquids, or even breathe […]

It should be just as sticky (or non-sticky) as normal matter. Here’s how we know. Not only here on Earth, but everywhere in the Universe that we look, we find structures […]

We might live in a quantum Universe, but we’ll violate the principle of relativity if space is discrete. If you try and divide matter into smaller and smaller chunks, you’ll […]

Your opinions about a large number of complex scientific issues are probably wrong. That’s why we have science. In 2016, an Italian virologist named Roberto Burioni was invited to appear on […]

Ending social distancing won’t only make us sicker, but will tank the health care industry in the process. The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic continues to spread around the world. As of today, […]

It isn’t just that mass and energy are equivalent and interchangeable. It tells us something fundamental about mass itself. Of all the equations that we use to describe the Universe, perhaps […]

We’ve never found eight stars bound together in the same stable system. But nature might make it so. The Universe that we have is often more wondrous and bizarre than even […]

And if you have a friend at the same longitude, you can even measure its circumference. This year’s equinox, on March 19/20 of 2020 (longitude-dependent), is Earth’s earliest in 124 […]

Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras. One of the first theorems anyone learns in mathematics is the Pythagorean Theorem: if you have a right triangle, then the square […]

Scientific surprises are often how science advances. But more often than not, they’re just bad science. When you’re a scientist, getting an unexpected result can be a double-edged sword. The best […]

If dark matter is fundamentally different from the normal matter we know, there should be a way to test it. Here are the results. Dark matter — despite the enormous indirect evidence for […]

The age of the Universe is only 13.8 billion years, but we know that protons survive much longer. Here’s how. Since the discovery of radioactivity in the 19th century, humanity has […]

It’s not a question we know enough to know the answer to, but to dismiss the possibility is scientifically baseless. There’s one question that most of us ask at some […]

In the middle of a great cosmic void, a single, isolated galaxy persists amidst the darkness. It’s about to get a lot lonelier. Here in our own cosmic backyard, the […]

A fascinating mathematical structure exists that goes well beyond our common experience. Could it revolutionize physics? Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Universe is that every particle within it — at […]

There’s real, straightforward science behind the destruction of an Alderaan-sized planet. In all of science fiction, perhaps the most iconic moment of destruction occurs in 1977’s Star Wars: A New […]

The most famous ‘supernova impostor’ of all could have died back in the 1840s. Here’s what we think kept it alive. In all of astronomy, no stellar event releases more energy […]

Even before MMA was a combat sport, it was a unique type of astronomy. Today, it’s opening up the Universe as never before. On February 24, 1987, a spectacular signal was […]

When you hear ‘quantum,’ you probably think of splitting everything into discrete, indivisible chunks. That’s not necessarily right. If you want to learn what the Universe is made out of […]