Planets are either rocky, like Earth, or gas-rich, like Neptune, with no in-between. What are the different types of planets that exist in the Universe? If all you could see […]
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It wasn’t the birth of space and time. But it was truly essential to our cosmic story. For more than 50 years, we’ve had definitive scientific evidence that our Universe, as […]
California’s Bobcat Fire has reached Mount Wilson Observatory’s doorstep. 100 years ago, our understanding of the Universe was very different from what it is today. Einstein’s General Relativity, our theory […]
Sex, it turns out, isn’t as easy or simple as popular culture might lead us to believe.
The view is different for each of us, but this perspective unites us all. From anywhere on Earth, the entire sky rotates a full 360° every 24 hours. From Earth, star […]
An analysis of the gravitational wave data from black hole mergers show that the event horizon area, and entropy, always increases.
The ethical debate over zoos is going to grow louder. There might be a solution that involves robots.
Light cannot escape from a black hole, no matter what. But when two black holes merge? They just might. On September 14, 2015, history was made as the NSF’s twin LIGO […]
This might help you make it to the end of Herman Melville’s 19th century classic.
The mismatch between theory and experiment is anything but certain. The most exciting moments in a scientist’s life occur when you get a result that defies your expectations. Whether you’re a […]
Today, we could use Big Data to radically reform democracy. Tomorrow, we could build nanofabricators and usher in an era of abundance. Is society ready?
These alien-like creatures are virtually invisible in the deep sea.
The results of a recent study suggest that some clinicians might be failing to explore other causes when treating gender dysphoria.
It’s fundamentally different from space. Here’s how. Here’s a question that most of us have been asked at some point in our lives, “what’s the shortest distance between two points?” By […]
A new study explains how a chaotic region just outside a black hole’s event horizon might provide a virtually endless supply of energy.
Haunting photographs depict the dead as “still with us.”
A new AI lie detector can dive into their hidden thoughts and reveal “what language models truly believe about the world.”
Whatever’s lurking out there, it isn’t all, or even mostly, normal matter. When it comes to the Universe, it’s only natural to wonder what, exactly, it is that makes everything up. […]
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently issued $8 million in follow-up funding to a team of neuroengineers developing brain-to-brain and brain-to-machine technology.
The questions about which massive structures to build, and where, are actually very hard to answer. Infrastructure is always about the future: It takes years to construct, and lasts for years beyond that.
Asking science to determine what happened before time began is like asking, “Who were you before you were born?”
How can we understand mysterious planets like Jupiter? Use giant lasers!
The far side of the Moon is incredibly different from the Earth-facing side. 63 years later, we know why the Moon’s faces are not alike.
While we can see many solar storms coming, some are “stealthy.” A new study shows how to detect them.
I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head. This is called “aphantasia.”
The strangest thing about trying to predict the future is that our only clues lie in the past.
We all employ heuristics to help us deal with the world. But when we make a hasty generalization, we risk making a big error in our thinking.
Why I was prepared to hate The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but ended up loving it.
Historically, periods of mass flourishing are underpinned by technological revolutions. Currently, we are undergoing a technological revolution unlike anything the world has ever seen.