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.

An artist's rendering of a spacecraft near an asteroid.
Whether you call it 10 quintillion, 10 million trillion, or 10 billion billion, it's a 1 followed by 19 zeroes.
A comparison of two rice plants focusing on their immunity.
The technology could yield "made-to-order resistance genes" to protect crops against pathogens and pests.
A tooth and a piece of wood juxtaposed in an unsettling manner.
A 1.5-million-year-old hominin bone shows signs that the victim was eaten by lions — and humans.
A man in a suit and tie is pointing to a quantum computer.
11mins
Theoretical physics professor Michio Kaku outlines the evolution of computers from analog to digital and introduces quantum computers as the next frontier.
standard model structure
Some constants, like the speed of light, exist with no underlying explanation. How many "fundamental constants" does our Universe require?
A woman poses in front of the letter x in a black and white photo.
The use of the letter x as an unknown is a relatively modern convention.
A man exploring quantum computing in a room with red lights.
Nature may not allow us full access to the weirdness of quantum mechanics.
A person making medical breakthroughs by looking through a microscope.
Ethicist and doctor Simon Whitney argues that society's overly cautious approach to medical research is blocking breakthroughs.
Raisin bread expanding Universe
Two fundamentally different ways of measuring the expanding Universe disagree. What's the root cause of this Hubble tension?
A group of silver balls resembling mercury surrounding a statue of a man influenced by Maya culture.
Today, many Maya sites are polluted with toxic levels of mercury. The contamination likely originated from cinnabar paints and art.
An image of the earth resonating in space.
The Schumann resonances are the background hum of the entire planet. But they don't affect humans in any way.
Gamma rays in the milky way.
As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery… consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
A metal railing supporting a white basket.
LK-99, almost certainly, isn't a room-temperature superconductor. The underlying physics of the phenomenon helps us understand why.
atom quantum
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we've probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.
A black hole in space with a planet in the middle.
How scientists are hearing the gravitational background "hum" of the Universe for the very first time.
Someday, scientists could use stem cells to guide the development of synthetic organs for patients awaiting transplants.
gaia ESA milky way
Einstein's laws of gravity have been challenged many times, but have always emerged victorious. Could wide binary stars change all that?