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To clear Scotland’s roads in winter, the local traffic agency employs heavy machinery with punny names. Can you grit and bear it?

The answer may lie in the particular way sand forms on Titan.

Creating an afterlife—or a simulation of one—would take vast amounts of energy. Some scientists think the best way to capture that energy is by building megastructures around stars.

If dogs are out in coats and boots, how are the squirrels feeling?

From hellishly hot planets to water worlds, some distant planets are like nothing in our Solar System.

Can two planets stably share the same orbit? Conventional wisdom says no, but a look at Saturn's moons might tell a different story.

Our Sun will continue to grow, becoming a red giant and then a planetary nebula. Here's how large it will get.

In all of science, no figures have changed the world more than Einstein and Newton. Will anyone ever be as revolutionary again?

We only detected our very first gravitational wave in 2015. Over the next two decades, we'll have thousands more.

Get ready for the most peculiar road trip that will help you understand the vastness and emptiness of the solar system — and Sweden.

Ultraviolet LED lights could soon be used to help disinfect air and surfaces in buildings, planes, subways and other spaces.

Unless you confront your theory with what's actually out there in the Universe, you're playing in the sandbox, not engaging in science.

Find a clear western horizon after sunset, and this ‘triple treat’ of a dance can be yours. Every once in a while, the night sky provides a spectacular feast for our […]

Graphical user interfaces are how most of us interact with computers, from iPhones to laptops. But they were once condemned as making students lazy and destroying the art of writing.

Venus has far more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere than Earth, which turned our sister planet into an inferno. But how did it get there?

The largest moon in our Solar System, often overlooked, is a water-rich world. Does that mean life? Here on Earth, life took hold very early on in our planet’s history, and […]

A Mercury-bound spacecraft's noisy flyby of our home planet.

Whether they’re gas giants or rocky planets makes all the difference for life. Over the past 30 years, we went from not knowing if there were planets like ours around other […]

Known as orphaned planets, rogue planets, or planets without parent stars, these "outliers" might be the most common planet of all.

In 2006, Pluto was demoted in a very controversial decision. Unless you ignore nearly all of planetary science, it'll never be one again.

Water is vital for life. Luckily for spacefaring humans, the solar system is full of it.

It's the origin of our entire observable Universe, but it's still not the very beginning of everything.

Archaeologists turn to other scientific fields to fill in the picture of how victims lived and why they died.

With the right material at the right temperature and a magnetic track, physics really does allow perpetual motion without energy loss.

The most momentous and significant events in our lives are the ones we do not see coming. Life is defined by the unforeseen.

Is science absolute? Its truths and discoveries guide us toward the nature of reality, but we must always remain open-minded to revisions.

When Einstein gave General Relativity to the world, he included an extraneous cosmological constant. How did his 'biggest blunder' occur?

A newly discovered “ultrahot Jupiter” has the shortest orbit of any known gas giant.

Although we still don't know the question, we know that the answer to life, the Universe, and everything is 42. Here are 5 possibilities.

The most feared sexually transmitted disease (STD) of the last half-millennium was usually named after foreigners, often the French.