With 1.6 billion households in the world, how does Santa do it? With a little Christmas magic… and a lot of science! How does Santa Claus do it? In one long […]

The Universe began almost perfectly uniform, while today, it’s anything but. Here’s how we grew up. One of the strangest facts about the Universe is how dramatically its changed over time. […]

When you emit gravitational waves, they have to pass through the Universe. But do they gravitate, too? When you travel through the Universe, it isn’t just a free ride through […]

A special isotope of plutonium is necessary for missions to Mars and beyond. But we don’t have enough, and aren’t making more fast enough. As 2018 comes to a close, NASA […]

It’s okay to be skeptical. That’s why we have evidence. In all of human history, only 24 people have ever flown to the vicinity of the Moon, traveling hundreds of […]

Behavioral ecology is a real science. But applying it to humans, with our social structures, is highly suspect. Imagine a scientist. Try closing your eyes and really picturing this person: envision […]

With the right material at the right temperature and a magnetic track, physics allows you to never lose energy. The idea of levitating off the ground has been a staple of […]

The expanding Universe really is accelerating, and no dusty scenario can explain it. 20 years ago, our understanding of the Universe underwent a revolution. For generations, we had known the Universe […]

It may have been captured by Neptune since it formed, but Triton remains king of the Kuiper belt. Our Solar System is arguably the most well-studied corner of the Universe, with […]

The first planets were only gas. The second included rocky ones, but life wasn’t possible. Here’s how we finally got there. Here in the Universe today, potentially habitable planets are practically […]

All the planets, asteroids, and Kuiper belt objects out there all point to the same conclusion: it’s giant impacts or no moons at all. Out of all the rocky planets […]

We can go to deeper and deeper levels, finding more fundamental quantities as we do. But is there a truly fundamental quantity? What is the Universe, at a fundamental level, […]

At ground zero, Trinitite, the green, glassy substance found in the area, is still radioactive and must not be picked up. The Trinity Site was where the first atomic bomb […]

It’s a problem that we still haven’t solved, and it spells doom for all of our low-Earth orbiting satellites, even today. On October 4th, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, […]

For more than 10 billion years, the star-formation rate across the Universe has been plummeting. Here’s the story. Take a look at a wide variety of galaxies in the Universe, and […]

The cosmic story of us, from before the Big Bang until today, is a story that all of us share. Enjoy it, in just 200 words. In the beginning, there was […]

Hubble holds the record, finding a galaxy when the Universe was just 3% it’s age. In just a few years, James Webb will shatter it. One of the great scientific lessons […]

By time you see a pillar at all, almost all of your ‘formation’ is already finished. In the heart of the Eagle Nebula, the iconic Pillars of Creation loom as […]

These ten ghostly astronomical sights house some deep-and-frightening scientific truths within them. With a huge suite of different observatories for viewing the Universe, innumerable details can be revealed. This ‘Godzilla’ asterism […]

There may be a fundamental reason why time travel, backwards, is impossible. We’ve all had the dream of traveling back in time. Whether there’s a wrong we want to right, […]