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.

Image shows Saturn with its rings on the left and Jupiter—with the thickest atmospheres in the solar system, colorful bands, and the Great Red Spot—on the right, both against a black background.
Obviously, the gas giants all top this list. But the fall-off is rapid after that, and the final two spots in the top 10 are truly shocking.
the night sky with stars and trees in the foreground.
Human beings only see the Universe now: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. What would the earliest life, anywhere, have seen instead?
Glowing green neural or fungal networks with scattered bright spots are visible against a black background.
Machine learning tools are allowing scientists to better understand forms of intelligence that operate on spaces and timescales utterly unlike our own.
Scientists are livid over the OSTP director's official report to the President. Will it lead to a new golden age for US science, or end it?
The grid features 15 images of distant galaxies, each labeled with identifiers and redshift values from z=4.75 to z=8.92. Captured by JWST, these celestial wonders include intriguing little red dots scattered across the vast cosmos.
200 years ago, we hardly knew anything about our Universe on cosmic scales. Today, there's so much that we know. Here's how we arrived.
heavy neutral atom
Early on, the entire Universe was ionized. Without the forbidden two-photon transition, it would have remained that way for far too long.
big crunch
Our Universe has a positive, non-zero value to the energy within empty space. Can we potentially save ourselves by considering vacuum decay?
pulse polio day india
It’s not a gambit. It’s not fraud. It’s not driven by opinion, prejudice, or bias. It's not unchallengeable. And it's more than facts alone.
A shot of the Perseid meteor shower
Although the Geminids have rivaled the Perseids recently, in 2026, the Perseids should win at their peak. Here's why, plus how to see them.
Colorful nebula with red and blue gas clouds, two bright stars—once separated stars now reunited after distant supernovae—and a rocky object, set against a star-filled background in space.
We've never witnessed a system of binary stars both go supernova before. A once-hidden source of gamma rays just revealed the first one.
A middle-aged man with a receding hairline, glasses, and a blue button-up shirt looks at the camera against a plain light background.
10mins
Why does life keep getting more complex? Why doesn't evolution get stuck? Physicist Stephen Wolfram has been working on this for decades. Turns out the answer is more simple (and more strange) than we expected.
A person writes equations on a chalkboard. Their face is obscured by a digital overlay of blue 1s and 0s.
If AI can someday make scientific breakthroughs, what would be left for the brightest human minds to discover?
A molecular cloud labeled G+0.693-0.027 is shown in space, with an inset displaying a 3D model of the erythulose molecule—a sugar that may provide clues about the origin of life—found within the cloud.
In a gas cloud 26,000 light-years away, a 4-carbon sugar, erythrulose, has just been found. Here's what it means for life in the Milky Way.
Mars is very different than Earth: smaller, drier, colder, etc. But the biggest long-term challenge, for human colonies, is its low gravity.
universe bulk volume brane dimension
Mathematics is our language for quantitatively describing reality, but it can also take us to worlds that never were. Physics needs more.
Two people at a protest hold signs reading "no vaccine passports" and "STOP COVID JABS FOR CHILDREN," with others standing nearby and flags visible in the background.
Astrophysicist Adam Frank used to think the consequences of rejecting science would play out on the individual level. He's since changed his mind.
Einstein
Many think that intelligence can be outsourced to AI. Einstein wouldn't have used it. If he had, he never would have become Einstein.
A middle-aged man with glasses and a receding hairline, wearing a blue shirt, looks toward the camera against a plain white background.
15mins
We experience only one small slice of the ruliad. What’s the ruliad? Stephen Wolfram explains.
elements Cas A remnant Chandra X-ray
Despite the brilliance of these cosmic beacons, only 1% of a core-collapse supernova's energy is observable. The other 99% is in neutrinos.
Illustration of black holes merging, showing spiraling paths and arrows indicating movement and direction, set against a dark, starry background.
With nearly 400 black hole events from gravitational waves, we can begin to infer their origins. At least two different populations emerge.