Search
Science & Tech
Explore the discoveries that reveal how the world works, alongside the technologies that extend, reshape, and sometimes challenge what’s possible.
Our existence is finite, but that’s no reason for despair. Here’s a version of the story we all should hear at least once. This world, and for that matter, the entire […]
Representation matters. Meet five stellar women in physics who were unjustly denied their place in history. Nobel season is now over, with another year in the books of celebrating the scientists […]
Planets can ‘discover’ nuclear power on their own, naturally, without any intelligence. Earth did it 1.7 billion years before humans. If you were hunting for alien intelligence, looking for a surefire […]
NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory has shown us the Universe like nothing else ever before. When it comes to the Universe, it mainly generates X-rays through high-temperature heating. X-rays from Chandra reveal […]
Instead of eternal expansion, could we just be part of a universal cosmic cycle? There are few questions that can keep us up at night the way pondering the eventual fate […]
If the Sun is 93 million miles away, why does sunlight filtering through the clouds or the trees spread out? Rays of sunshine are one of those natural sights that leave […]
These three reasons are why there’s no getting around the fact that astronomy needs the James Webb Space Telescope. Even the most powerful telescope in history, the Hubble Space Telescope, […]
LIGO’s enormous arms contract and expand as gravitational waves pass through them. But, puzzlingly, so does the light within them. For the past three years, humanity has known a new kind […]
The nightmare scenario of no new particles or interactions at the LHC is coming true. And it might be our own fault. Over at the Large Hadron Collider, protons simultaneously circle […]
Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe became completely dark. The first stars, when they ignited, changed everything. For perhaps 100 million years, the Universe was devoid of stars. The […]
An Oxford physicist tries to cast doubt on dark energy, but the data says otherwise. It was a mere 20 years ago that our picture of the Universe got a […]
Of all the experiments performed and measurements made involving fundamental particles, none has ever violated the Standard Model. Until now. If there’s one thing you can count on physicists for, it’s […]
Our biases, preferences, and ideas of simplicity and elegance can get in the way. Here’s a scientific way to cut through them all. What are the rules governing reality? If you […]
Some wildfires will always be unavoidable. But nature, thankfully, recovers relatively quickly. The past few years have brought some devastating wildfires to large parts of the American west. A wildfire […]
Dark matter is our leading theory for a reason. New, detailed studies of the smallest galaxies could kill off the most studied alternative. When you look out at the Universe, […]
One of the most popular viral videos about space is dead wrong. But it gives us a chance to learn something incredible. There are a lot of moving parts to […]
Our Universe may not be all there is, was, or ever will be, after all. There’s been a lot of speculative ideas put forth about the Multiverse, and I dare say […]
Different measurements of the Universe’s rate of expansion give inconsistent results. But this simple solution could fix everything. In 1915, Einstein’s theory of General Relativity gave us a brand new […]
The Universe was born matter-antimatter symmetric. Here’s what happened when the last of our antimatter disappeared. Things happen fast in the earliest stages of the Universe. In the first 25 […]
In all the years of NASA, we’ve never touched the Sun before. Here’s why it’s so hard. This past weekend, NASA successfully launched the Parker Solar Probe: the first spacecraft that […]