Astronomers have discovered five new planets surrounding a star just twelve light years from Earth. One has a mass five times our planet’s and exists in its star’s habitable zone.
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Cruelty preoccupies me. I find that stories of cruelty stay with me, hauntingly, and infiltrate deeply. I cannot conceive of it in its most basic elements, the physical act of […]
Comet ISON was first spotted well beyond Jupiter’s orbit, which makes it fairly large. If it makes it past the sun it could light up the night sky by this time next year.
Just as some cars’ seats vibrate when another car is in the driver’s blind spot, the wheel uses GPS and sensors to alert drivers who may be experiencing temporary bright light blindness.
They are blamed for or suspected in the unexplained failure of electronic devices ranging from coffee makers to commercial satellites. A student recently received a major award for figuring out why they develop.
We can’t toss aside our responsibilities but we can take steps – even small ones – to better manage stress.
A new paper says the “rogue planet” is drifting in space about 100 light-years away from Earth, raising speculations as to how many others are out there.
China’s RT-Mart is beating out its Western rivals in the hypermarket industry by giving their stores features that are familiar to customers who normally get their groceries off the street.
The amount of solar energy being produced by solar panels is doubling every 2 years.
The dwarf planet, one of five that exist at the outer edges of the solar system, recently passed in front of a star, allowing astronomers their first shot at getting some really good data.
At 17 billion times the mass of the sun, it could be the biggest of its kind found to date, and its existence may shake up scientists’ knowledge of how galaxies are born and evolve.
This week my son’s school was canceled for the day, in the usual hyperventilating overreaction to weather. At first the school proposed to open two hours late, and I was […]
“If You’re Too Busy To Meditate, Read This,” proclaimed a wildly popular Harvard Business Review story a few months ago. It was but one data point we observed as we […]
The magic “x-factor” that people talk about when they talk about talent is not so magical: it’s simply a matter of hard work. And no other craft reminds one of […]
The ability to upload the human brain into computer software, or advanced artificial intelligence modeled on specific individuals, could overcome technical roadblocks to deep-space flight.
Looking into a sliver of sky known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, astronomers have found light from galaxies born just after the big bang, telling scientists more about the early universe.
Scientists have succeeded in shaping a solar cell into a fiber that’s flexible enough to be woven into a fabric that can be used to power an electronic device.
In a mid-career essay about his elder contemporary Robert Frost, the poet W. H. Auden observes that “[Thomas] Hardy, [W. B.] Yeats and Frost have all written epitaphs for themselves.” […]
When the College of Cardinals convenes next month in the Sistine Chapel to elect the successor to Pope Benedict XVI, Michelangelo’s majestic ceiling will hang over them while his Last […]
The 35-year-old spacecraft is currently traveling through a previously undiscovered zone between the heliosphere and interstellar space.
Forget about those coated costume contact lenses: Scientists in Belgium have created a lens with a curved, flexible LCD display.
Isogloss maps are irresistible, even if they are about cucumbers
The title Lost in the Cosmos is meant to be a correction to Carl Sagan’s “splendid picture book” Cosmos, which Percy understands as a failed self-help book. Sagan aims to get […]
There’s a moment in Keith Richards’ recent memoir when he pauses his tale of addiction and debauchery to reflect that, once a certain number of stories about his excesses had been told […]
With Easter and Passover on the minds of so many millions of Christians and Jews this weekend, so are the deeper themes of renewal, promise, and liberation that these religious […]
With the help of NASA’s Kepler long-range scanning mission, scientists have located a solar system in which two planets are orbiting around two suns, confirming that multiple-planet “circumbinary systems” exist.
I recently read an excerpt from the controversial number one bestseller Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife by Dr. Eben Alexander in Newsweek magazine. In it he […]
We have reached a moral, legal and demographic tipping point in the controversy. Many signs point to an imminent marriage revolution: gay and lesbian Americans across the country will enjoy a right to marry — maybe before the end of the year.
Krishnamurti was faced with an unsolvable dilemma not unfamiliar to spiritual teachers. He often implored his audience to not take anything he says as truth, but to find it for […]
Humans experience joy in a multitude of ways, yet the varied forms of suffering—death, divorce, separation—return to one root principle: loss. What drives the fear of loss is something far […]