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.

World map showing total radiance change from 2014 to 2022, with areas highlighted for dimming (purple) and brightening (yellow) in nighttime lights.
Light pollution now steals a pristine night sky from the majority of humanity. The rise of LED lighting, primarily since 2014, is to blame.
Illustration of multiple spiral galaxies and stars being pulled toward a central black hole in deep space, with blue and purple light streaks tracing the motion along a dark energy curve that shapes the universe.
Today, in the here-and-now, a full 13.8 billion years have elapsed since the start of the hot Big Bang. But would that be true for everyone?
atom quantum
In physics, we reduce things to their elementary, fundamental components, and build emergent things out of them. That's not the full story.
Three side-by-side images of a spiral galaxy show increasing detail and brightness, highlighting dust, stars, and a bright galactic center with radiating diffraction spikes.
Messier 77 is one of the largest nearby spiral galaxies, with an active, brilliant core. Here's what JWST's incomparable eyes saw inside it.
A robot stands next to a young girl who is sitting at a table, writing in a notebook with food and drinks nearby.
A look at what could be if we ignore the doomers and make the most of AI.
A graph showing star brightness over time during a Kuiper Belt occultation event, with a grayish planet above and two plotted lines labeled Fukushima and Kiso Obs—shedding light on the discovery of distant atmospheres.
A relatively tiny world in the Kuiper belt, just 500 km in diameter, has an atmosphere after all, joining Pluto. Here's what we know today.
Four people wearing backpacks and outdoor gear hike through a grassy, forested area with trees in the background under an overcast sky.
The soils of "managed forests" can take decades to rebuild the carbon stocks and microbial communities found in undisturbed forests.
A dense star field and distant galaxies with bright galaxy clusters and several white squares highlighting specific points in the image.
Only nearby objects appear to the naked eye. With telescopes of all types, especially in space, we've smashed those records many times over.
A detailed view of Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, showing its icy surface with light and dark regions, photographed against a black background.
Triton is Neptune's largest moon today, but it was once the undisputed king of the Kuiper belt. Here's why the outer solar system matters.
A deep space image showing numerous distant galaxies of various shapes and sizes scattered across a dark background, revealing just how empty is space between these cosmic islands.
There's a lot of room in interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space, but just how low the densities go is truly mind-boggling.
two particles different wavelength speed of light
Contrary to common experience, not everything needs a medium to travel through. Overcoming that assumption removes the need for an aether.
Two people examine scientific equipment in a laboratory, working on a large metallic device surrounded by cables and tools, as they investigate the physics mystery G—the elusive mystery gravitational constant.
Newton's gravitational constant, G, is still known to just 3 significant figures in 2026. New measurements merely highlight our uncertainty.
pluto moons hubble
In 2006, the IAU defined "planet" for the first time, excluding Pluto and all other dwarf planets. In 2026, is it now time for a change?
A vibrant cosmic scene reveals a galaxy with bright jets of energy, hottest stars twinkling vividly amidst scattered stars against a dark backdrop.
From within our own galaxy to behemoths billions of light-years away, supermassive black holes create jets like nothing else in the cosmos.
A colored pixelated grid with rectangular outlines; a legend in the top right labels blue as F115W, green as F200W, and red as F277W—capturing data from the JWST to record a distant galaxy.
It takes incredible energies to accelerate masses near the speed of light. So how do the farthest galaxies speed away from us so quickly?
A color-enhanced image shows Pluto planet in the foreground with its moon Charon in the background, both set against a black space backdrop.
In 2006, Pluto was controversially demoted to "dwarf planet" by the IAU. Unless you ignore most of astrophysics, it won't ever be one again.
Gloved hands arrange Scrabble tiles on a grid, forming the words "ABRACADABRA," "FART," "HEART," "SHIT," "BIRD," and "LAST.
From WEIRD psychology to SHIT telescopes, researchers keep turning complex ideas into catchy shorthand.
Bullet Cluster separation mass gravity x-ray lensing
The first colliding galaxy cluster to reveal dark matter, empirically, turns 20 this year. Here's why it cements dark matter's existence.
A person with hair floating upwards looks out of a spacecraft window at Earth, filled with hope as clouds and oceans shimmer below—a view reminiscent of the Artemis II mission’s journey.
NASA has just sent astronauts back to the Moon for the first time since 1972 with Artemis II. So why would we cut NASA and NSF science now?
Chart illustrating the Standard Model of Elementary Particles, as found in the early universe, divided into quarks, leptons, gauge bosons, and the Higgs boson, with details on mass, charge, and generation.
Today, we have the Standard Model of particles with four fundamental forces governing them. But things weren't always the way they are now.