Lab Notes
Engineering the climate
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...
Crowding the night sky
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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...
Scouting for life on Mars
In 2012, a Dutch foundation called Mars One announced plans to establish a permanent human colony on Mars, with the first settlers arriving in...
Mining for solar storms
In his recent book Accessory to War, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson and coauthor Avis Lang document the historical relationship between science and the military,...
Comet ATLAS shrugs
In late December 2019, a telescope in Hawaii operated by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) discovered a comet on its way to...
Boosting solar physics
Shortly after the financial crash of 2008, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to stimulate the economy with $787 billion in...
Diving into Saturn
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...
Cheating extinction
When a huge space-rock fell from the sky 66 million years ago, it quickly brought an end to the age of the dinosaurs. Rat-like...
Akatsuki returns from the dead
It is Dec. 7, 2015. We’re in Sagamihara, Japan, a little southwest of Tokyo. On a clear day like today, you can just make...
Naming the stars
The holiday season is a peak time for companies that sell the novelty gift of “naming a star,” with a framed certificate and a...
Bouncing off the satellites
On Oct. 30, NASA finally retired the Kepler space telescope, the prolific planet-hunter that has been scanning the skies for the past nine years....
Living with a star
Just after Christmas 2019, a NASA spacecraft soared past Venus toward the inner solar system, and near the end of January 2020, it passed...
