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.

3D geometric shape with colored edges and yellow triangular faces, appearing as a complex polyhedron on a black background—reminiscent of structures often explored in AI breakthrough research and theoretical physics.
Making more complicated, more precise predictive calculations tells us what real experiments should deliver. AI just surpassed humans at it.
A woman with gray hair in a bob, wearing a beige blazer and gold necklace, sits against a plain white background, looking slightly upwards with a neutral expression.
7mins
Jennifer Doudna co-invented CRISPR. Now she's the one asking how much power we should be allowed to handle.
evolution of the Universe from all free particles to stable atomic nuclei to neutral atoms
The expanding Universe, CMB, and large-scale structure revealed the Big Bang. New nucleosynthesis advances deliver unprecedented precision.
Voyager 1
We strongly suspect we aren't alone in the Universe, but so far, we haven't found anyone. What determines when we'll finally make contact?
A page titled “The Philosophy of Time Travel” and a folded paper with a sinister, smiling skull drawing are set against a geometric, tunnel-like background, alluding to the mysterious lessons in physics and mortality found within Donnie Darko.
Most time travel stories involve changing the past to create a better future. "Donnie Darko" subverts that expectation, and a whole lot more.
standard model color
Predicted back in the 1960s, 2012's discovery of the Higgs boson completed the Standard Model. But the biggest Higgs puzzle still persists.
Einstein field equations
Although many of Einstein's papers revolutionized physics, there's one Einsteinian advance, generally, that towers over all the rest.
crab pulsar remnant
Millisecond pulsars are the Universe's most accurate natural clocks. A pulse change, thought rare, just occurred twice in the closest one.
Illustration of a person composed of various household items standing beside a desk with writing materials on it.
Tech journalist Joanna Stern spent a year using as many AI products as she could. It changed more than her workflow.
A colorful, abstract scientific illustration with a central glowing sphere, circular patterns, and various lines and circles suggesting quantum connections or uncertainty data points, on a dark background with blue accents.
From a primordial soup of particles, atoms eventually emerged. What happened to make it so, and could things have worked out any other way?
colliding black holes
All matter particles can act as waves, and massless light waves show particle-like behavior. Can gravitational waves also be particle-like?
black hole hawking
The matter that creates black holes won't be what comes out when they evaporate. Will the black hole information paradox ever be solved?
A person in a cleanroom suit stands next to a large cylindrical scientific instrument inside a high-tech laboratory with bright lighting and metallic walls, where one blip of dark matter was recently detected.
In 1982, an experiment showed unprecedented evidence for exotic matter: magnetic monopoles. But without reproducibility, it didn't hold up.
Satellite view of Earth showing Eurasia at night, with illuminated areas highlighting population density and settlements across the continent.
Until recently, nobody had visualized the fungal "Wood Wide Web."
blue marble not 24 hours apollo 17
As the Earth spins and wobbles on its axis and revolves elliptically around the Sun, each day differs from the last. "24 hours" isn't right.
A bright flash of light in the Universe
In general relativity, white holes are just as mathematically plausible as black holes. Black holes are real; what about white holes?
Book cover with the title “Kobuk the Destroyer” by Alex Davies, featuring a bear firing a cannon and a flying rabbit reminiscent of Jimmy Doolittle’s daring spirit, all set against a striking red background.
Jimmy Doolittle pushed aircraft to their limits and, in the process, helped turn flight testing from daredevilry into a discipline.
Raisin bread expanding Universe
The evidence that the Universe is expanding is overwhelming. But how? By stretching the existing space, or by creating new space itself?
time
We experience time as real. But what if it's only an illusion: an illusion that's inherently relative? Does time fundamentally even exist?
Split image: Left side shows a close-up of a DNA double helix; right side, a child outdoors creating a large bubble with a pink wand.
12mins
Doctors told Noa Greenwood's family that she wasn't expected to live past age ten. This new biotech changed that, and opened the doors to a whole new wave of medical funding, treatment, and care.
BridgeBio