Don’t wait until Christmas to gift a telescope this year. All throughout the year, two bright lights have stood out in the post-sunset skies. Earlier this year, on March 31, 2020, […]

And can scientists even agree on what ‘nothing’ means? The more curious we get about the great cosmic unknowns, the more unanswered questions our investigations of the Universe will reveal. […]

If you forgot to defrost your turkey, definitely don’t put it in a deep fryer. Every year, households all across the United States face a troubling dilemma with no good solutions: […]

There’s more light than we can account for, and we’ve just measured it robustly for the first time. When we look out at the darkest night skies available on Earth, even […]

In our Universe, a left hand reflected in a mirror or pond appears to be a right hand. While most of the laws of nature are symmetric under reflections, obeying […]

With three colors and three anticolors, there aren’t actually nine gluons; only eight. One of the most puzzling features of the Universe is the strong nuclear force. Inside every proton or […]

Often viewed as a theoretical, calculational tool only, the Lamb Shift proved their existence. If you spend enough time listening to theoretical physicists, it starts to sound like there are […]

We haven’t discovered life beyond our Solar System yet, but we’re closer than ever before. Over the past 30 years, we’ve gone from zero exoplanets to thousands. With each new […]

Entropy always increases, but that doesn’t mean it was zero to start with. One of the most inviolable laws in the Universe is the second law of thermodynamics: that in any […]

No matter how accurately you place two Plinko chips, you cannot count on the same outcome twice. Of all the pricing games on the iconic television show The Price Is Right, […]

You might be inclined to modify gravity instead, but those ideas have grossly unequal evidence supporting them. What is it, exactly, that you’re supposed to do when the predictions of […]

We still don’t know how the information encoded onto it gets out. No matter what you do in the Universe, its overall entropy always increases. Even when we put things in […]

As long as it remains operational, we’ll have a chance to conduct groundbreaking science with it. In the history of spaceflight, only five spacecraft ever launched by humanity possess enough energy […]

And the Macho King, Randy Savage! Over this coming week, things will be quiet here at Starts With A Bang, as I’ll be taking the next week off. But to help […]

If we want our conclusions to be meaningful, our data had better be robust. When it comes to the Universe, there’s a whole lot that doesn’t add up. All the matter […]

If there’s no phosphine, there’s no indirect evidence for biological activity there. In one of the biggest surprises in the history of planetary science, a September 2020 study announced the presence […]

As we embrace green solutions, nuclear should absolutely be part of the equation. For thousands upon thousands of years, humans have been harnessing the power of nature to provide energy […]

Sure, we’re warming now. But will this continue, or will natural factors change things? According to our best understanding of Earth’s climate, the global average temperature has increased significantly over the […]

Yes, we’d all die. But for 21 minutes, we’d have the ride of a lifetime. One of the most remarkable facts about the Universe is this: in the absence of […]

We’re Earth’s first intelligent, technologically advanced civilization. But maybe not the last. For most of our planet’s history, life in some form has existed on our world. Planet Earth formed some […]