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.
In 1974, scientists at the Arecibo Observatory broadcast a 1,679-bit binary message toward the globular cluster M13, knowing the signal would take 25,000 years to arrive and any reply would take another 25,000 to return. Here's what was in the message, why they sent it anyway, and where the signal is right now.
European Earth-observation companies are absorbing a surge of commercial demand for satellite imagery of Iran and the Gulf after the largest US operator withdrew its data from the open market at the Trump administration's request.
The James Webb Space Telescope sits at a gravitational balance point a million miles from Earth, firing its thrusters on a regular cadence to stay in place. When its propellant runs out, no rescue mission exists to save it.
The James Webb Space Telescope wasn't supposed to find any of this.
The Amazon contains roughly 80,000 plant species, and ayahuasca requires precisely two of them combined in a way that defies straightforward botanical reasoning — a fact that has puzzled pharmacologists for decades.
The popular claim that women smell better than men holds up under scrutiny — but the mechanism, and the pregnancy effect, are stranger and more contested than the headline suggests.
The pattern is a familiar one to anyone who pays attention to how the older people in their life have aged.
The corpus callosum data is real and the effect size is small, but the cultural story built on top of it is doing far more work than the neuroscience can support.
Aboriginal songlines preserve detailed navigational, cultural, and ecological knowledge along documented routes, while Australia’s roughly 65,000-year human history provides archaeological context rather than a date for every surviving song.
In January 2004, a golf-cart-sized robot bounced down through the atmosphere of Mars on a cluster of airbags, rolled to a stop, and started doing what it was sent to do.
Three shamanic traditions separated by oceans and ice caps independently arrived at the same three-tiered map of reality, and the convergence is harder to dismiss than the standard ethnographic framing allows.
The arithmetic is brutal in its simplicity: the air moving through your lungs right now has already been moved through every other set of lungs in human history.
There is a category of psychological research that gets discussed in two largely separate literatures, even though the people doing the research are looking at the same conditions in two different uniforms.
The world's largest pile of oil money is now quietly buying the machinery designed to replace oil, and the contradiction is more structural than hypocritical.
Roughly half the water on Earth formed in interstellar clouds before the Sun existed. A new study of comet 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar visitor ever detected, has now measured water from another planetary system for the first time, finding deuterium levels 30 times higher than any solar system comet.
