Shortly after planet Earth formed, life took a permanent hold on our surface. But just how common is such an outcome?
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The Universe, according to our best understanding, just doesn’t add up. The Universe, according to our best understanding, just doesn’t add up. Wherever we look — from tiny subatomic scales all the way […]
The study identified superhabitable planets outside of our solar system.
Jonathan Berman wants us to have better dialogues.
The largest moon in our Solar System, often overlooked, is a water-rich world. Does that mean life? Here on Earth, life took hold very early on in our planet’s history, and […]
The first Earth-sized planet without a parent star has just been discovered. For countless millennia, planets beyond our Solar System were mere speculation. Today, we know of over 4,000 confirmed […]
Remember Stephen Hawking's robotic voice? It wasn’t a robot.
Why not just divide the United States in slices of equal population?
In our Universe, a left hand reflected in a mirror or pond appears to be a right hand. While most of the laws of nature are symmetric under reflections, obeying […]
Complex organisms and living worlds couldn’t exist without these transitions. You couldn’t make the Universe we have today if everything were always the same. Although many philosophically favored the idea […]
Telescopes from the ground are bigger, but have to fight the atmosphere. Here’s how to win. In astronomy, seeing farther and fainter than ever before requires three simultaneous approaches. First light, […]
The Big Bang is our accepted origin of the Universe. But is there another possibility? Since the mid-1960s and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the Big Bang has […]
NASA’s SOFIA mission is upgraded and back in action, and the Cigar Galaxy makes a perfect target. In theory, cold, neutral gas is the key to stars and galaxies. A visualization […]
The mission could launch as soon as the 2030s, the researchers said.
Are dark matter and dark energy both two sides of the same coin? When it comes to the Universe, what you can easily see isn’t always reflective of all there is. […]
Have any of the stars we can see burned themselves out completely? When we look out across the Universe, we’re also peering back in time. In the early 21st-century, we’ve […]
Need a distraction during these stay-at-home times? Look up tonight to see the first supermoon of spring.
Smart bandages quickly identify antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and normal bacteria, in owies.
The Universe is dark, but the distorted light reveals its presence. When we look at the objects in the Universe, the mass just doesn’t add up. A galaxy that was […]
A new study from Ohio State University details implicit bias.
Its record-holding galaxy is 32 billion light-years away, in a Universe that’s only 13.8 billion years old. On April 24, 2020, humanity celebrates the 30th anniversary of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. […]
Deniers will never stop misleading others. Here’s the truth. Every so often, advocates of a fringe theory — one that doesn’t fit the evidence as well as the mainstream theory — do what they can […]
It’s perhaps the most famous thought experiment in all of physics, but is full of popular myths and misconceptions. One of the most bizarre ideas about the quantum Universe is […]
Is the “big freeze” our inevitable fate, or can dark energy save us? When we look out at the Universe today, we see sources of light practically everywhere we look. In […]
The 20th century was marked by waves of pro-democracy revolutions. Now, the future of democracy looks uncertain.
The Big Bang started it all. And then we realized there was more. Of all the questions humanity has ever pondered, perhaps the most profound is, “where did all of this […]
Of all the injustices in Nobel Prize history, her 1957 Nobel snub is the most egregious. One of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century was the discovery of […]
The inevitable long, slow decline is accelerating, and there’s nothing we can do. The Universe, as it is today, is less active, is forming fewer stars, and is creating fewer chances […]
And either way, is energy or information conserved? When two things in the Universe that “always” occur meet one another, how do you know which one will win? Gravitational waves, […]
Entropy always increases, but that doesn’t mean it was zero to start with. One of the most inviolable laws in the Universe is the second law of thermodynamics: that in any […]