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“It is more human to laugh at life than to lament it.”

The idea of gravitational redshift crossed Einstein’s mind years before General Relativity was complete. Here’s why it had to be there.

Observations of an enormous cosmic structure, dubbed the “Big Ring,” seem to violate the Copernican principle.

Quantum entanglement may remain spooky, but it has a very practical side.

In partisan political times, recognizing the scientific truth is more important than ever. Scientists must be vocal and clear about reality.

The first stars in the Universe were made of pristine material: hydrogen and helium alone. Once they die, nothing escapes their pollution.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge” is often taken to mean that your conceptions outweigh what’s real. That’s not what he said.

The Universe changes remarkably over time, with some entities surviving and others simply decaying away. Is this cosmic evolution at work?

We cannot afford to dream about living on other worlds while we continue to destroy ours.

The carnival spirit was in full swing when the priests got wasted and made indecent gestures while dressed like pimps.

Pessimism reigned supreme.

A reader asks whether we have an ethical responsibility to always debate bad beliefs, especially those that come from our elders.

Scientific surprises, driven by experiment, are often how science advances. But more often than not, they’re just bad science.

At a fundamental level, nobody knows whether gravity is truly quantum in nature. A novel experiment strongly hints that it is.

Ultracold gases in the lab could help scientists better understand the universe.

Human civilization has always survived periods of change. Will our rapidly evolving technological era be an exception to the rule?

The strongest tests of curved space are only possible around the lowest-mass black holes of all. Their small event horizons are the key.

“The surface is no longer a record of every impact the moon has ever had, because at some point, impacts were erasing previous impacts.”

Experiments on suborbital rockets are revealing how to make a better iron furnace.

Even the dictionary doesn’t get the definition right.

At 1,600 light years away, the black hole is practically in our cosmic backyard.

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

Nothing lives forever, at least, not in the physical Universe. But relativity allows us to get closer than ever, from one perspective.

Although a great many unidentified sights have been seen in the skies, none have conclusively demonstrated the presence of aliens. So far.

To Einstein, nature had to be rational. But quantum physics showed us that there was not always a way to make it so.

The evidence that the Universe is expanding is overwhelming. But how? By stretching the existing space, or by creating new space itself?

In many ways, we are still novices playing with toy models seeking to understand the stars. 

In the early stages of our Solar System, there were three life-friendly planets: Venus, Earth, and Mars. Only Earth thrived. Here’s why.

We knew we’d find galaxies unlike any seen before in its first deep-field image. But the other images hold secrets even more profound.

An army of replicators belonging to national laboratories, research universities, and amateur garages is rushing to replicate ambient superconductivity in LK-99.