The sacrifices of early astronauts paved the way for Apollo’s successes, and so much more. In all of history, only 24 humans have ever escaped Earth’s gravity. The very first launch […]
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It’s something most adults don’t understand very well. So what should you tell a child? If you’ve ever had a conversation with an inquisitive, curious child, you might have experienced that […]
The Big Bang started it all. And then we realized there was more. Of all the questions humanity has ever pondered, perhaps the most profound is, “where did all of this […]
Forgetting them, at any step, can lead to unscientific conclusions. No one, not even the smartest among us, were competent scientists from the outset. The concept of science is simple […]
The view from beyond Pluto is far enough from Earth that we can see the stars shift. NASA’s New Horizons, humanity’s first spacecraft to encounter Pluto, is more than 4.3 billion […]
Scientists figured out how a certain treatment for skin cancer gives some patients a visual “superpower.”
Exceptionally high-quality videos allow scientists to formally introduce a remarkable new comb jelly.
Fermilab’s TeVatron just released the best mass measurement of the W-boson, ever. Here’s what doesn’t add up.
From Brahms to Tchaikovsky, here’s a curated list of composers whose music has shaped the classical canon.
A new study explores how the brain encodes different scents — a topic which scientists know relatively little about, compared to our other senses.
It’s not just about SpaceX and Starlink. What we’re deciding today will have a global impact for years and decades to come. For countless millennia, human beings have gazed up into […]
It doesn’t have to be a science-fiction dream. For as long as human beings have been watching the night sky, we’ve dreamed of visiting other worlds and truly seeing what’s […]
There is a neurological link between serotonin levels and the brain’s ability to control impulses and patience levels.
We bring multifaceted selves to our interactions, and in these interactions co-create each other again and again.
We’ve never found eight stars bound together in the same stable system. But nature might make it so. The Universe that we have is often more wondrous and bizarre than even […]
Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is only one of two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is merely one among the […]
She helped create CRISPR, a gene-editing technology that is changing the way we treat genetic diseases and even how we produce food.
Get the answer from two physicists who study black holes (albeit from a safe distance).
Esoteric evidence points to a ritual performed by Queen Elizabeth’s court magician John Dee.
One of NASA’s original great observatories, Spitzer showed us the infrared Universe as never before. On January 30, 2020, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was retired after a 17 year mission. Prior […]
Physicists create quantum entanglement, making two distant objects behave as one.
Why does dark matter, if it doesn’t dissipate energy, become gravitationally bound at all? One of the most puzzling components of the Universe has to be dark matter. Although we have […]
All the fun of opening up a mummy, without the fear of unleashing a plague.
What can ‘behaviorism’ teach us about ourselves?
A generation ago, NASA launched their great observatories to explore the Universe. It’s time for round 2. Throughout the history of astronomy, every advance we’ve ever made has come about because […]
Demanding appropriate levels of skepticism and scrutiny isn’t cruelty, but rather demonstrates scientific integrity and intellectual honesty. Every few months, a novel headline will fly across the world, claiming to […]
A colliding star may have triggered the drastic transformation.
The center of the galaxy is mostly obscure in visible light. But thanks to the world’s most powerful infrared telescope, we can see inside. Throughout history, the sight of the Milky […]
The Big Bang was hot, dense, uniform, and filled with matter and energy. Before that? There was nothing. Here’s how that’s possible.