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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.
In all the Universe, there’s only one Earth. But can we find the other worlds that are like ours? Even though the ingredients for life have been confirmed to be practically […]
There is a fundamental difference between matter and antimatter. But not enough of one to explain our Universe. Our Universe is a vast and enormous place, and if there’s one […]
It’s rare but spectacular when the Moon passes in front of another planet. Here’s how to see it. From our perspective on Earth, the night sky appears virtually unchanged with the […]
Earth wasn’t the only potentially habitable planet in the early Solar System. What happened to Mars? If you could travel back in time to the early stages of the Solar System, […]
The visible light portion of the spectrum is tiny compared to the whole thing. Here’s what we’re missing. When you look at the Milky Way in visible light, you might see […]
LIGO and Virgo have now detected a total of 11 binary merger events. But exactly 0 were in the Milky Way. Here’s why. One of the most spectacular recent advances in […]
In order to reap the greatest rewards, we have to think big and invest big. One of these four missions will deliver like never before. When it comes to exploring the […]
The transition across a quantum barrier is known as quantum tunneling, and the amount of time it takes for such a transition to occur had never been measured before. For […]
Even if we don’t destroy ourselves, we always have the Universe to contend with. Wiping out all life on Earth is hard, but causing mass extinctions is easy. The 1991 eruption […]
Both effects could be responsible for a redshift. But only one makes sense for our Universe. In physics, like in life, there are often multiple solutions to a problem that […]
If you accept cosmic inflation and quantum physics, there’s no way out. The Multiverse is real. Look out at the Universe all you want, with arbitrarily powerful technology, and you’ll never […]
While the web of dark matter (purple) might seem to determine cosmic structure formation on its own, the feedback from normal matter (red) can severely impact galactic scales. Both dark […]
The ‘giant impact’ that led to Earth might not have been so giant, after all. A little over 4.5 billion years ago, our Solar System began to form. Somewhere in the […]
As more time passes since the Big Bang, more of the Universe comes into view. But how much? Even though it’s been billions of years since the Big Bang, there’s a […]
50 years ago, Apollo 9 launched. Without it, we never would’ve landed on the Moon. The Apollo program is most famous for its greatest achievement: taking humanity to the Moon. It […]
Gravity gets weaker as the distance squared. But gravitational waves only get weaker as the distance. Why? One of the things we often just accept about the world is that […]
Before we formed stars, atoms, elements, or even got rid of our antimatter, the Big Bang made neutrinos. And we found them. The idea of the Big Bang has captivated the […]
What happened 4.56 billion years ago is the most important part of the cosmic story ever to happen to us. If you were to look at our Universe at the time […]
But we shouldn’t give up on direct detection. Here’s why. Dark matter is not only the most abundant form of matter in the Universe, it’s also the most mysterious. Whereas all […]
In 2017, we saw gravitational waves a neutron star merger for the first and only time. And it keeps getting more interesting. On August 17, 2017, a cosmic signal arrived […]