Mansa Musa, perhaps history’s richest man, claims he ascended the throne of Mali after his predecessor sailed west and never came back. Could he have made it to the New World?
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Whether you call it 10 quintillion, 10 million trillion, or 10 billion billion, it’s a 1 followed by 19 zeroes.
Frozen adversity set the stage for an explosion of diversity.
Take a closer look before judging a book by its title.
Just by observing the tiny amount of deuterium left over from the Big Bang, we can determine that dark matter and dark energy must exist.
The Universe begins with negligible amounts of angular momentum, which is always conserved. So why do planets, stars, and galaxies all spin?
If there are human-sized creatures walking around on other planets, would we be able to view them directly?
For the past 150+ years, the big ones have all missed us. But at some point, our good luck will run out.
For some reason, when we talk about the age of stars, galaxies, and the Universe, we use “years” to measure time. Can we do better?
The odds are slim, but the consequences would be devastating. Here’s what would happen, plus how to avoid it.
Migrating our planet to a safer orbit might be the only way to preserve Earth after all the ice melts.
We once thought the Moon was completely airless, but it turns out it has an atmosphere, after all. Even wilder: It has a tail of its own.
We’re all entitled to our own opinions, no matter how ill-informed they are. But facts are facts; we can’t just choose the ones we prefer.
Empty, intergalactic space is just 2.725 K: not even three degrees above absolute zero. But the Boomerang Nebula is even colder.
Seven years ago, an outburst in a distant galaxy brightened and faded away. Afterward, a new supermassive black hole jet emerged, but how?
In Kannauj, perfumers have been making monsoon-infused mitti attar for centuries.
The electromagnetic force can be attractive, repulsive, or “bendy,” but is always mediated by the photon. How does one particle do it all?
Most potentially hazardous asteroids remain unidentified. NEO surveyor could change that, but only if it’s funded, and soon.
After 15 years of monitoring 68 objects known as millisecond pulsars, we’ve found the Universe’s background gravitational wave signal!
Thanks to protocols established centuries ago in Europe, world leaders no longer need to worry about having their heads bashed with an axe.
Smoke taint from wildfires is gross, even to wine amateurs.
There’s a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on beneath the single plate of Mars.
Earth is actively broadcasting and actively searching for intelligent civilizations. But could our technology even detect ourselves?
The tech world’s fixation on artificial intelligence has spawned beliefs and rituals that resemble religion — complete with digital deities, moral codes, and threats of damnation.
The past ~4 billion years have been an incredibly successful, unbroken run for life on Earth. The future won’t be nearly so bright.
The author of classics like “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sun Also Rises” is known and loved for his simple yet effective writing style. Here’s how to imitate it.
These astounding inventions show that civilizations of the past were a lot more advanced than we might have thought.
We have long thought that Pluto was completely frozen solid, but the discovery of cryovolcanoes challenges that assumption.