Lab Notes

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

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...

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

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...

In March 1989, a powerful eruption from the Sun slammed into the Earth’s magnetic field and took down a regional power grid in Canada,...

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

More than a century ago, Albert Einstein proposed a new theory of gravity, suggesting that concentrations of matter warp the underlying fabric of space,...

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...

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

As the Atlas V rocket’s inferno lit up the night sky early in the evening of Nov. 19, 2016, it was as if the...

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...