Lab Notes

On April 23, SpaceX launched another crew of astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), the third successful mission of the commercial crew transport...

In his 2001 book Who Owns the Sky, entrepreneur Peter Barnes suggests that any system designed to tax heat-trapping pollution must redistribute the revenue...

I finally arrive on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California, around 3:30 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 15 to bear witness to the final gravitational dance...

Four billion miles from the Earth on New Year’s Eve, a spacecraft traveling at 32,000 miles per hour zoomed past a tiny object roughly...

In 1966, astronomer Olin Wilson started what would become a decades-long pursuit, searching for an answer to a simple question. Wilson knew that observations...

This is one of humanity’s most fundamental and persistent questions. The answer has always seemed, until recently, elusive and out of reach. But this is beginning to change. Biologists have been deepening our understanding of what kinds of environments life might ...

In his recent book Accessory to War, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson and coauthor Avis Lang document the historical relationship between science and the military,...

The holiday season is a peak time for companies that sell the novelty gift of “naming a star,” with a framed certificate and a...

In 2012, a Dutch foundation called Mars One announced plans to establish a permanent human colony on Mars, with the first settlers arriving in...

To those of us living in Boulder and surrounding communities, it may come as a surprise that many people remain unconvinced that the use of fossil fuels is the main contributor to current climate change. But before diving into the discussion of the consequences of ...

I n mid-March, SpaceX launched 60 satellites into orbit 340 miles above the surface of the Earth, part of a planned global broadband internet service...

In the 1960s, the Apollo missions to the moon inspired a generation of scientists and engineers to pursue careers in space exploration. On the heels of those successes, the Voyager missions to the outer solar system inspired my generation. I vividly remember the ...