If everything was hot, dense, and super close-together at the Big Bang, what kept us from collapsing into a singularity? The Big Bang is one of the most counterintuitive ideas […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

The Universe may defy our intuition, but that’s what science is for! If you take a look out at the Universe, and in every direction you look, you see objects rushing […]

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’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: […]

Would there be only blackness past the event horizon? Or something more? Black holes are some of the most perplexing objects in the entire Universe. Objects so dense, where gravitation […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

What if alien life — or even intelligence — don’t look like what we’re searching for? When the original Star Trek premiered, it was revolutionary for depicting sentient, intelligent species other than humans, living […]

Aiming for the nearest star would necessitate a whole slew of advances. Even if the mission fails, humanity wins by investing in itself. There have been some magnificent moments in NASA […]

Out of five vital questions, which one should we most desire the answer to? Despite all we’ve learned about physics, science, and the Universe before us, there are still some incredibly […]