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Science & Tech
Explore the discoveries that reveal how the world works, alongside the technologies that extend, reshape, and sometimes challenge what’s possible.
The view from beyond Pluto is far enough from Earth that we can see the stars shift. NASA’s New Horizons, humanity’s first spacecraft to encounter Pluto, is more than 4.3 billion […]
Even physicists sometimes fall for these. For centuries, the laws of physics seemed completely deterministic. If you knew where every particle was, how fast it was moving, and what the forces […]
Too little breathing room, tear gas, and insufficient masks are a recipe for disaster. Police are worsening all three. Across the nation and the world, people of all skin colors are […]
Solid, liquid, and gas are the three everyone learns. Plasma is the fourth. But there are two more, and they’re fascinating. How many states of matter are there? When you […]
We’re looking back farther in time than ever before. Here’s what we’re finding. Even today, the Universe is forming enormous numbers of new stars: from various nebulae throughout our galaxy to […]
It happened 13.8 billion years ago, so why hasn’t the radiation all passed over us by now? For the past 13.8 billion years, our Universe has been expanding, cooling, and gravitating. […]
They said the “missing half” of the Universe’s matter was just found. But what they found barely makes a dent to the big picture. When we look up into the great […]
The origin of the 3rd element on the periodic table was one of the great cosmic mysteries. We just solved it. How did we form the elements that pervade the Universe […]
It’s not only about what’s happening right now. Things need to change for good. It could be your colleague, your coworker, your staff member, or your student. As the world mourns […]
Maybe 100% of stars don’t have planets, after all. When stars form in the Universe, they’re created in giant bursts. A stellar nursery in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy […]
It’s not just about SpaceX and Starlink. What we’re deciding today will have a global impact for years and decades to come. For countless millennia, human beings have gazed up into […]
To find the optimal route between many different locations, we need the power of quantum computers.
Think they all burn through their fuel, die, and leave white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes behind? Think again. The day will come when our Sun, like most stars, can […]
The double-slit experiment, all these years later, still holds the key mystery at the heart of quantum physics. When we divide up matter into the smallest possible chunks that it’s made […]
In order, they go: hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, nitrogen, magnesium, silicon, iron, sulfur. Here’s how we made them. Everything found on planet Earth is composed of the same ingredients: atoms. […]
Extraterrestrial life should arise fairly easily. But intelligence is another matter entirely. Planet Earth has been around for the past 4.5 billion years or so: about the last third of […]
Mathematics is the most useful tool we have for understanding the Universe. But it doesn’t answer to anything on its own. At the frontiers of theoretical physics, many of the most […]
If you traveled in a straight line for far enough, would you come back to where you started? If you were to set out on a journey from anywhere on Earth’s […]
Find a clear western horizon after sunset, and this ‘triple treat’ of a dance can be yours. Every once in a while, the night sky provides a spectacular feast for our […]
There are three things your new theory must do in order to be taken seriously as science. This one’s 0-for-3. Every once in a while, a revolutionary idea comes along that […]