A joint European-Chinese spacecraft built to image Earth's magnetic shield launched Tuesday from French Guiana, opening a three-year mission to study how the planet responds to the constant pressure of the solar wind.
Lord Rayleigh showed that when sunlight passes through a gas, the gas molecules scatter shorter wavelengths much more efficiently than longer ones — by a factor of roughly the inverse fourth power of the wavelength.
In late August and early September 1859, Earth was struck by a sequence of geomagnetic disturbances, the largest of them on 1 and 2 September.
On December 15, 1970, a Soviet probe the size of a small refrigerator hit the surface of Venus, tipped onto its side, and kept transmitting.
The Pentagon is restructuring Golden Dome, a missile defense program, to operate more like a Silicon Valley platform than a traditional weapons procurement…
The human brain is, by every available measure, an unusual organ in terms of its energy demands.
The standard cultural framing of dark matter tends to treat it as a known scientific substance.
Every human eye has, on close examination, a small region of the retina where there are no light-sensing cells.
The standard cultural intuition about memory treats it as something like a recording.
The fastest object ever built by humans is a small spacecraft, roughly the size of a compact car, currently flying through the outer atmosphere of the Sun at 430,000 miles per hour.
The standard cultural register, when it considers the question of who is good at making accurate judgments, tends to focus on intelligence as the primary variable.
On a windswept slope of the White Mountains in eastern California, somewhere between 9,500 and 9,800 feet above sea level, in a grove of bristlecone pines that…
When professional mathematicians describe the moment a difficult proof finally falls into place, the language they reach for is, on the available evidence, almost always closer to discovery than to invention.
In December 2017, a team of researchers led by Adam Brumm and Maxime Aubert of Griffith University, working with Indonesian archaeologists, climbed into a remote limestone cave called Leang Tedongnge on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Europe and China's joint Smile spacecraft reached orbit early Tuesday, opening a three-year campaign to capture the first global X-ray images of the invisible magnetic shield that has deflected solar wind from Earth for nearly four billion years.
On November 16, 1974, a 305-meter dish set into a sinkhole in the karst hills fired a narrow beam of radio waves toward the constellation Hercules for two minutes and 49 seconds.
