Lab Notes

Probing nearby stars

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Four miles from the launch pad, standing on the roof of the 44-story vehicle assembly building where NASA constructed the space shuttles, I hold...

Pimping science news

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Science journalism has been declining for years, under the same media pressures that have made local news an endangered species. Boulder County is one...

Diving into Saturn

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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...

Hitching a ride to orbit

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

Searching for sister Earth

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In last year’s blockbuster movie Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey leads a team of astronauts on a quest to find a new planet like Earth, after humanity collectively destroys the climate on the only home we’ve got...

Developing a NASA mission

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Imagine spending years coming up with an exciting idea for a space telescope, proposing it to NASA, and getting approval to develop the concept...

Discovering Ultima Thule

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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...

Engineering the climate

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Last month at a conference in Paris, 195 countries adopted a landmark agreement on how to respond to the Earth’s changing climate. The agreement...

Are we alone in the universe?

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 ...

Boosting solar physics

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Shortly after the financial crash of 2008, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to stimulate the economy with $787 billion in...

Juno reaches Jupiter

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In Roman mythology, Jupiter is king of the gods and his wife Juno is the queen. Jupiter was known for his infidelity, so Juno...

Voluntary depopulation

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During the first two weeks of December, delegates from around the world are meeting in Madrid for the latest round of international negotiations to...