Science & Tech

Science & Tech

Explore the discoveries that reveal how the world works, alongside the technologies that extend, reshape, and sometimes challenge what’s possible.

A man sits on a chair against a white backdrop, placed in front of the Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, under a clear blue sky.
53mins
Members
Sam Kean examines how rogue archaeologists are recreating the sounds, tastes, smells, and practices of the ancient past.
A hand holds a red square above an eye shape, symbolizing the brain after blindness, with a geometric wireframe cube below on a blue circle, all set against a pale green background.
When people born blind gain sight, the hardest part isn’t opening their eyes — it’s teaching the brain how to see.
Illustration of astronauts working on a large spherical satellite or space station in outer space, with stars in the background.
3mins
Thanks to modern tech, Earth is now considered a ‘detectable’ planet. Astrophysicist Sara Seager explains how this idea can lead us to discovering life elsewhere in our universe.
Voyager
No human has ever left the Solar System, and only six already-launched spacecraft will ever exit it. Will Voyager 1 remain the most distant?
A man in glasses and a suit jacket sits indoors, gesturing with his right hand. Exposed brick walls, a window, and a lamp are visible in the background.
16mins
"The production of the silicon wafers that are used in the chip manufacturing process requires extraordinary levels of purity."
black hole
Quantum entanglement links information between particles across space and time. So what happens when one of them falls into a black hole?
A radio telescope observes a distant galaxy; insets show a magnified view of the galaxy—home to the most distant laser—and a spectral graph. Illustration attributed to IDIA.
Forget about the terawatt lasers we're making on Earth. The Universe makes natural ones thousands of times more powerful than the Sun.
hubble tension
Even space and time are relative in Einstein's universe. That means our old notions of "where" and "when" no longer apply on cosmic scales.
A satellite with extended accordion-like solar panels or reflectors, possibly supporting AI data centers in space, orbits above Earth, with the planet’s surface visible in the background.
There are plenty of engineering obstacles, and those can be overcome. But you cannot change the laws of physics, and those matter too.
The fundamental building blocks of reality are indivisible: quanta that cannot be split or divided. Our understanding remains incomplete.
White lines intersect around a central, glowing sphere on a black background, creating a complex geometric and abstract pattern that suggests how nothing can persist when the universe dies.
Long after the last star burns out, the Universe will experience its end state: a heat death. Will everything prior then be meaningless?
A solid orange rectangle fills the entire image without any patterns, text, or distinguishing features.
Science fiction romanticized Mars as a place of adventure and future settlement; science tells a very different story.
quark gluon plasma primordial soup
Before we formed stars, atoms, elements, or even got rid of our antimatter, the Big Bang made neutrinos. And we finally found them.
Illustration of ape to human evolution with skeletal figures, labeled amino acids, and colorful dots representing molecular structures, highlighting metabolism and the origin of life on Earth.
A big open question in 21st-century science is how life began here on Earth. The metabolism-first scenario just might be the best one.
A gloved hand arranges five test tubes labeled with book titles and authors in a white rack against a light background.
The “dystopian” biotech imagined in these novels is now changing real lives for the better.
An illustration of a padlock with one half depicting a DNA strand and the other half showing a green circuit board pattern, symbolizing biodefense, set against a pink background.
From global DNA screening standards to safeguards for benchtop synthesizers and AI tools, a new biosecurity playbook is taking shape.
simple collage of runner
Technology, shifting rules, and human ambition push athletes beyond biology’s perceived limits.
Illustration of silhouetted people on scaffolding assembling a large globe with a crane hook against a textured pink background.
New biotech tools could clean up everything from construction to agriculture.
A split image explores the nature of life, with a gray rock on a dark background on the left and a colored microscopic view of a cell—hinting at intelligence—in vivid detail on the right.
Sixty years ago, a little-known philosopher challenged how science understands life. His perspective is finding new relevance in the age of artificial intelligence.
Illustration of various animal and human silhouettes in colored circles connected by arrows, set against a textured abstract background, evoking themes of speculative evolution.
Speculative evolution explores the strange paths natural selection might have taken — and what that means for humans.