Science and Tech

Science and Tech

Geological time drawn as a spiral
Humanity can avoid catastrophe — if we look beyond our blinkered present.
inflation spawn parallel universes
Our huge, expanding Universe may truly be infinite. But if the set of possible quantum outcomes is also infinite, which "infinity" wins?
a woman's mouth with letters in the background.
In order to figure out how English might evolve in the future, we have to look at how it has changed in the near and distant past.
a map with a red line on it.
Dig a 70-mile tunnel under the Bering Strait, and you get this amazing InterContinental Railway, which will reshape the world.
a blurry image of a person walking down a street.
Psychedelics mess with our prior beliefs, and could help us see what forms these beliefs in the first place.
a clock that is in the middle of a picture.
If the evolution of the Universe is a movie, what happens when we rewind it all the way backward?
a bottle of beer next to a toilet paper roll.
Beer's flavor begins to change as soon as it is packaged. Are cans or bottles better at preserving flavor?
a red and yellow car driving down a street next to a crowd.
Steam cars hit the U.S. market in the 1890s but were largely extinct by the 1930s. Will technology bring them back?
Hubble view of galaxy containing GRB 221009A BOAT
Gamma-ray bursts are among the most energetic cosmic events of all. On October 9, 2022, a remarkable one occurred: the brightest ever seen.
a roll of patriotic ribbon on a white surface.
Estonia has long been seen as a pioneer in digitizing the democratic process.
a blurry photo of a city street at night.
Time gets a little strange as you approach the speed of light.
a man holding a microphone in front of a blue background.
“It doesn’t erase what happened to you. It just changes the impact it has on your life.” 
an astronaut contemplates a black hole
That scary swirling void from which nothing can escape is our perfect universal translation tool.
JWST CEERS 1 hour field
Many galaxies really are ultra-distant, but some are just intrinsically red or dusty. Only with spectroscopy can JWST tell which is which.
the interior of a large cathedral with chandeliers.
The cathedral is being explored as never before.
A black-and-white painting depicts a man with tousled hair, a mustache, and a suit with a tie, facing forward against a textured background.
8mins
What makes some scientists culturally significant, while others remain in obscurity? Well, there’s a science to it.
a woman working on a laptop in a factory.
It is easy to underestimate how much the world can change within a lifetime.
a man in a lab coat holding a test tube
A blood test to diagnose mental illness is a "holy grail" of psychiatry.
a man sitting in front of a laptop computer.
To what extent will our psychological vulnerabilities shape our interactions with emerging technologies?
a black and white photo of an animal skull.
Researchers discovered something modern humans had never before seen—a flashy Neanderthal horn collection.
a star burst in the middle of the night sky.
We are about to learn a lot more about the most elusive of cosmic particles.
a close up of a person with curly hair.
The curlier the hair, the cooler you are.
the sun is setting over the ocean on a cloudy day.
Temperatures in the Sun's core exceed 10 million degrees Celsius. But how on Earth did we actually come to know that?
three test tubes with colored liquids in them.
Not everything that claims to be "scientific" actually is. There are five features of scientifically rigorous studies.
a close up of a bunch of wooden sticks.
A new discovery pushes back the origin of these technologies by about 40,000 years.
inside of xenon
With a bigger, better, and more sensitive detector, the XENON collaboration joins LZ and PANDA-X in constraining WIMP dark matter.
a man sitting on the bow of a sailboat.
Biological age is a better health indicator than the number of years you’ve lived, but it’s tricky to measure.
a drawing of a mountain and a satellite dish.
Theory without experiment is blind, and experiment without theory is lame.
a collage of a woman's face with a colorful background.
1hr 19mins
Steven Pinker explains how to cultivate greater rationality in today's complex world.
photon paths around black hole
What do we mean by a black hole's size? A photon sphere? The minimal stable orbit? The event horizon? The singularity? Which one is right?