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Science & Tech
Explore the discoveries that reveal how the world works, alongside the technologies that extend, reshape, and sometimes challenge what’s possible.
Between war, disease, environmental destruction, and resource overconsumption, our civilization's future is uncertain. Can science save us?
As far as we can tell, there's no limit to how far it goes on; only a limit to how far we can see. Could the Universe truly be infinite?
A Cold War accident became a reliable tool for using artificial lights at night to map GDP, poverty, urban sprawl, and even illegal fishing.
The Earth is a massive planet, but doesn't form a truly perfect sphere. Here's how to understand our strongest and weakest gravity points.
Neither Vannevar Bush's "Science: the Endless Frontier" nor OSTP's "Science: A New Golden Age" got it fully right. Here's what they missed.
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.
Human beings only see the Universe now: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. What would the earliest life, anywhere, have seen instead?
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?
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.
Early on, the entire Universe was ionized. Without the forbidden two-photon transition, it would have remained that way for far too long.
Our Universe has a positive, non-zero value to the energy within empty space. Can we potentially save ourselves by considering vacuum decay?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If AI can someday make scientific breakthroughs, what would be left for the brightest human minds to discover?
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.
Mathematics is our language for quantitatively describing reality, but it can also take us to worlds that never were. Physics needs more.