For decades, astrophysicists have theorized that the majority of matter in our Universe is made up of a mysterious invisible mass known as “Dark Matter” (DM). While scientists have not yet found any direct evidence of this invisible mass ...
A new type of low-cost battery could help solve the renewable energy storage problem, giving us a better way to bank solar and wind energy for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The challenge: A ...
This Christmas, I can rely on three things. First, the turkey will be overcooked and dry. Second, my brother will utterly ignore my Christmas list and buy me some ridiculous miscellany of weirdness. And, third, my dad will go ...
When a spiral galaxy presents itself just right, observations reveal more detail. That’s the case with NGC 7469, a spiral galaxy about 220 million light-years away. It’s face-on towards us, and the James Webb Space Telescope captured its revealing ...
jQuery(function(){ if (typeof jwplayer_load == typeof indefined) { var jwplayer_load = 1; jQuery(window).load(function(){ jQuery(".sc_video_shortcode_jwplayer").each(function(){ var _this = $(this); jQuery.get(jQuery(this).attr("url"), function(data, status){ if (typeof data.split("\n") !== typeof undefined) { var src = data.split("\n")[4]; src = src.replace(".m3u8", ""); _this.attr("src", src); } ...
Someday, if nature is kind to us, we’ll make the grandest discovery of all: that we aren’t alone in the Universe. While various observatories and space missions might someday soon find life on other worlds, our ultimate ambition is ...
SpaceX has won a contract to launch the joint US-European Sentinel 6B radar satellite as early as November 2025. Five years ago, NASA also chose SpaceX to launch Sentinel 6A, the first of two identical satellites designed to use ...
In a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal, a pair of researchers led by The Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute in California investigated the potential origin for the thick regolith deposits on Uranus’ moon, Miranda. ...
Ada Lovelace, known as the first computer programmer, was born on Dec. 10, 1815, more than a century before digital electronic computers were developed. Lovelace has been hailed as a model for girls in science, technology, engineering and math ...
Black holes are confounding objects that stretch physics to its limits. The most massive ones lurk in the centers of large galaxies like ours. They dominate the galactic center, and when a star gets too close, the black hole’s ...
In the not-too-distant future, a planetary scientist will open up a tube of rocks that came from Mars. Thanks to the Perseverance rover, there are at least 17 of these rock and regolith samples, just waiting for analysis on ...
As 2022 comes to a close, now is a good time to look back and ask how we, as a species, are doing. After all, this is the season of peace and goodwill to everyone. A quick review shows ...
In 1994, a successful but relatively unknown businessman named Jeff Bezos resigned from his position as senior vice-president of the Wall Street-based hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. when he learned that World Wide Web usage was growing at ...
A massive new study shows that adult lifespan can be divided into three distinct phases based on sleep duration. The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, also shows a relationship between sleep duration and cognitive performance in later ...
People routinely make snide jokes about the inaccuracy of weather forecasts. It’s a status quo that irks MIT Professor Emeritus Kerry A. Emanuel and Penn State Professors Richard Alley and Fuqing Zhang, because, as the trio of experts in ...
We all know the routine by heart: “Please ensure your seats are in the upright position, tray tables stowed, window shades are up, laptops are stored in the overhead bins and electronic devices are set to flight mode”. Now, ...
The Universe, as we see it today, sure is full of “stuff.” Everything we see, feel, and interact with is made of subatomic particles at the most fundamental level, and they’ve assembled into large structures — humans, planets, stars, ...
SpaceX has told the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that it plans to begin launching its first next-generation Starlink Gen2 satellites before the end of 2022. The FCC only just granted SpaceX partial approval of its Starlink Gen2 constellation, which ...
On November 16th, NASA launched the first mission of the Artemis Program (Artemis I), which splashed down three and a half weeks later. This uncrewed mission saw the Space Launch System (SLS) send an Orion spacecraft far beyond the ...
The InSight lander might have transmitted its last picture from the surface of Mars. It looks like the lander is succumbing to Mars’ dusty conditions, as its ability to generate energy from its solar panels has been declining in ...
The James Webb Space Telescope is delivering a deluge of images and data to eager scientists and other hungry-minded people. So far, the telescope has shown us the iconic Pillars of Creation like we’ve never seen them before, the ...
The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), part of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, is the world’s premiere single-dish radio telescope. Between its 100-meter dish (328-foot), unblocked aperture, and excellent surface accuracy, the GBT provides unprecedented ...
On September 26th, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft collided with Dimorphos, the small moonlet that orbits the larger Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) Didymos. The purpose was to test a planetary defense technique known as the kinetic impact method, ...
Employers participating in the AAC&U’s periodic surveys consistently rank critical thinking as one of the most vital skills for success in the workplace. The 2020 survey ranked it second in importance only to the ability to work effectively in ...
Jupiter is the most-visited planet in the Solar System, thanks largely to NASA. It all started with Pioneer 10 and 11, followed by Voyager 1 and 2. Those were all flyby missions, and it wasn’t until 1996 that the ...
In Ian Fleming’s world of James Bond, Agent 007 has a “license to kill.” What this means is that Bond has the right to make a decision whether to use lethal force to accomplish a greater good. But humans ...
Plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that psychedelic drugs can induce mystical and existential experiences that alter the user’s view of the world or outlook on life, but there has been little investigation of these claims. Now, research published in ...
jQuery(function(){ if (typeof jwplayer_load == typeof indefined) { var jwplayer_load = 1; jQuery(window).load(function(){ jQuery(".sc_video_shortcode_jwplayer").each(function(){ var _this = $(this); jQuery.get(jQuery(this).attr("url"), function(data, status){ if (typeof data.split("\n") !== typeof undefined) { var src = data.split("\n")[4]; src = src.replace(".m3u8", ""); _this.attr("src", src); } ...
In all of science, perhaps the greatest quest of all is to go beyond our current understanding of how the Universe works to find a more fundamental, truer description of reality than what we have at present. In terms ...
SpaceX says its Starlink satellite internet service has surpassed one million active subscribers just two years after its first limited beta release. SpaceX began launching operational Starlink satellites in November 2019. A little over three years later, the company ...
Ukraine will receive over 10,000 Starlink antennas to help counter Russian air attacks, said Mykhailo Fedorov, deputy prime minister and minister for digital transformation, in an interview with Bloomberg. Fedorov said that he has spoken with Elon Musk directly ...
Since it launched on December 25th, 2021 (quite the Christmas present!), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken the sharpest and most detailed images of the Universe, surpassing even its predecessor, the venerable Hubble Space Telescope! But what ...
Here’s a thorny problem: What if life doesn’t always appear on planets that can support it? What if we find more and more exoplanets and determine that some of them are habitable? What if we also determine that life ...
When evaluating the most significant innovations of any calendar year, it’s often a struggle to decide among a handful of equally worthy contenders. Not this year. Over the last 12 months, one category of technology has made headlines so ...
To see what the future might look like it is often helpful to study our history. This is what I will do in this article. I retrace the brief history of computers and artificial intelligence to see what we ...
There is no shortage of bad news in media headlines. “Climate change is already killing us,” the World Health Organization (WHO) declared in the run up to the UN’s COP 27 Climate Change Conference. “Low levels of air pollution ...
Around 350 BC, the scholar Pāṇini composed a grammatical treatise of astounding breadth and comprehension. Known as the Aṣṭādhyāyī, it contained 4,000 sūtras, or rules, for writing classical Sanskrit. The extensive work also distinguishes between how the language should ...
In this season of religious holidays, when we cherish peace and goodwill, those of us who think about our place in the Universe might wonder what ethical standards aliens — particularly technologically advanced aliens — might follow if we ...
All of us, whenever we seek to understand something more deeply, run into an awkward situation: where we think we understand how something works, only to discover that we ourselves are misinformed. Sometimes it’s only about trivial matters that ...
As of December 19th, 2022, 5,227 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 3,908 systems, with over 9,000 more awaiting confirmation. While most of these planets are Jupiter- or Neptune-sized gas giants or rocky planets many times the size of ...