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Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

It’s the ultimate setup for a Thanksgiving Day disaster. The physics of water and its solid, liquid, and gas phases compels us not to do it.

It’s not just fun: DNA origami has the potential to revolutionize engineering at the nanoscopic scale.

More than any other equation in physics, E = mc² is recognizable and profound. But what do we actually learn about reality from it?

A member of a species that kills trees, this mushroom is not the first to be called the Humongous Fungus — and perhaps not the last.

In “Life As No One Knows It,” Sara Imari Walker explains why the key distinction between life and other kinds of “things” is how life uses information.

While ice itself is slick, slippery, and difficult to navigate across under most circumstances, skaters easily glide across the ice.

There are at least 15 different types of solid water (ice). Now, scientists believe that there might be a second type of liquid water.

If an asteroid hadn’t killed off the dinosaurs, humans would almost certainly have never walked the Earth.

Astro Mechanica’s “turboelectric” jet engines offer a way to transform both commercial flights and space launches.

This biochemist is determined to create a new life form by reversing the shape of molecules.

Symmetries aren’t just about folding or rotating a piece of paper, but have a profound array of applications when it comes to physics.

Asteroid collisions aren’t always bad.

“Block. It puts some writers down for months. It puts some writers down for life.”

Our Universe requires dark matter in order to make sense of things, astrophysically. Could massive photons do the trick?

Gods and angels have been replaced with hi-tech extraterrestrials.

A concept known as “wave-particle duality” famously applies to light. But it also applies to all matter — including you.

Research suggests that to maintain a healthy brain, we should tend our gut microbiome.

Figuring out the answer involved a prism, a pail of water, and a 50 year effort by the most famous father-son astronomer duo ever.

On Nov. 13, 1946, a scientist dropped crushed dry ice from a plane into supercooled stratus clouds.

Crafting an effective learning and development strategy can be challenging. Here are five key considerations.

Man does not live by measurement alone.

Is the time crystal really an otherworldly revolution, leveraging quantum computing that will change physics forever?

Due to a crust of carbon, the absence of oxygen, and constant bombardment from meteorites, the planet Mercury may be littered with diamonds.

Skepticism is appropriate when gazing into the futurist’s crystal ball.

Pando is a stand of aspen in Utah that is 14,000 years old and weighs 12 million pounds. Humans threaten to end its long reign.

Researchers have discovered 830-million-year-old microbes living inside a salt rock on Earth. Could the same occur on Mars?

A lucky discovery involving lithium-sulfur batteries has a legitimate chance to revolutionize how we power our world.

They say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. But thanks to these three pioneers in quantum entanglement, perhaps we do.

The ten greatest ideas in science form the bedrock of modern biology, chemistry, and physics. Everyone should be familiar with them.