Search
Science and Tech
In 2016, the number of opioid-related deaths hit 42,000, an all-time record. But gun deaths were nearly that same number, and have been consistently that high. If you want to know […]
With hundreds of billions of stars burning bright, ‘dead’ seems like a bit of an exaggeration. But every galaxy is headed for this fate, including ours. As long as a […]
Even our scientific heroes can’t be right about everything. Let’s learn the lessons that they never did. In the 1960s, a young theoretical physicist named Stephen Hawking rose to prominence as […]
For every planet that orbits a star like our own, there are likely thousands of ‘orphan planets’ wandering the galaxy alone. Here in the Solar System, we can watch our star’s […]
One of the three basic circuit elements just got a lot smaller for the very first time, in what promises to be a trillion-dollar breakthrough. In the race for ever-improving […]
There have been a lot of public advocates from the “no dark matter” camp, getting lots of popular attention. But the Universe still needs dark matter. Here’s why. If you took […]
For most of us, it’s something we just accept every year. But there’s arguably no good that comes from it. Every year on the second Sunday in March, most places in […]
The possibilities were almost limitless, so why does everything line up? Our Solar System is an orderly place, with the four inner planets, the asteroid belt, and the gas giant worlds […]
In the quantum world of the unstable, even identical particles don’t have identical masses. In the microscopic world of the quantum particle, there are certain rules that are wholly unfamiliar […]
If the multiverse is real, why hasn’t our Universe, in a sea of infinite possibilities, run into another one at least once? The Universe we inhabit is vast, full of matter […]
Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist. There are a few fundamental facts about the Universe — its origin, […]
LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, will not only be the space-based successor to LIGO, but will predict black hole mergers up to years in advance. Across the Universe, innumerable masses […]
A single, complete view of half the world was enough to teach us how these distant, frozen bodies work. On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons flew by Pluto. Pluto’s atmosphere, […]
The medal-winning Norwegian team had a most unusual explanation for why their speed skaters wore blue. Is there any science to back it up? Every four years, the Olympics come around, […]
Okay, this is an incredible and rare opportunity, but I’m so pleased to announce that next January, from the 18th-24th, 2019, I’ll be leading an exclusive AstroTour of Iceland! We’ll […]
The season finale gets the one thing Star Trek is famous for — ethics — completely wrong. Life is full of dilemmas whose solutions seem paradoxical. To obtain peace, you must prepare for war. […]
If you want to go where no one has gone before, you have to make the investment. Here’s what last week’s launch means. If you want to send humans to Mars, […]
The hole in the ozone is shrinking, for sure, but to assess the whole layer, you need to look at the whole Earth. Throughout the history of life on Earth, there’s […]
Did you hear the story about how a 100 petawatt laser will finally ‘break the quantum vacuum’? Get the facts. Empty space, as it turns out, isn’t so empty. The fluctuations […]
It isn’t just for merging neutron stars, anymore. Over the past three years, there’s arguably been no greater scientific discovery than the direct detection of gravitational waves. The two LIGO […]
If everything goes right, astronomy will take a magnificent leap into the future. But here’s what needs to happen first. Back in 2000, NASA held their decadal survey, choosing what would […]
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe. For hundreds of years, there was an immutable law of physics that was never challenged: […]
If nothing can escape from beneath the event horizon, where do these phenomena come from? The most important feature of a black hole is that it has an event horizon: a […]
There’s nothing new, recent, or remarkable about it. It’s just a typical cosmic pebble in the galactic ocean. Last year, the interstellar interloper ʻOumuamua passed through the inner Solar System. Originally […]
The deep dive into the mirror Universe, and the ethics of how we deal with purity and diversity, is just getting started. Life in the mirror Universe isn’t easy for anyone. […]
What do our future missions in physics, astronomy, astrophysics and more hold? If you went back in time just 30 years, the world as we it was a completely different place. […]
Are we looking for life in all the wrong ways, like SETI with smoke signals? A little over 80 years ago, humanity first began broadcasting radio and television signals with enough […]
They’re less than a billion years old. And, thanks to ALMA, they might finally pave the way to understanding how galaxies form. How do galaxies like our Milky Way come to […]
They’re the fastest rotators of all. So how distorted are they? There are very few objects in the Universe that stand still; almost everything we know of rotates in some way. […]
A cosmic controversy is back, and at least one camp — perhaps both — is making an unidentified error. Ever since Hubble first discovered the relationship between a galaxy’s distance and its motion away […]