Pets can provide companionship and comfort. Bed-sharing may help or disrupt sleep, and the choice does not establish a deeper truth about human intimacy.
Nobody tells you, in any of the standard accounts of what midlife is going to involve, that the most important relationship you will have during it is the one with the version of yourself you were at twenty.
There is a particular small experience that happens, in most adult lives, somewhere in the late thirties or early forties, that the wider cultural register has not, on the available evidence, given precise language to.
There is a particular kind of peace that appears in the lives of some adults somewhere in their sixties and seventies, and that the wider cultural register has not, on the available evidence, given particularly precise language to.
The standard cultural framing of the Apollo Guidance Computer tends to emphasize one half of the story.
In 2024, a single American company launched 134 orbital rockets. In 2025, that company is on track to launch around 170. The company is SpaceX.
The James Webb Space Telescope is, as of this writing in 2026, orbiting a point in space called L2, somewhere around a million miles from Earth.
In early 1977, a small committee at Cornell University was given a task that had no real precedent in the history of human communication.
The standard cultural image of astronaut food has not, on the available evidence, updated meaningfully since the 1980s.
On 10 April 2026, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, completing a nearly ten-day flight that had taken them 252,756 miles (about 406,771 kilometres) from Earth at their farthest point.
By the time NASA receives Voyager 1's next status check, the spacecraft has already moved more than 1.4 million kilometres further into interstellar space.
Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and Linda Salzman Sagan designed the gold plaques bolted to Pioneer 10 and 11 in about three weeks before launch. The figures they engraved are still moving outward, billions of miles from the Sun.
On September 21, 2003, NASA deliberately steered the Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter at 108,000 miles per hour to keep its plutonium-powered hull from ever reaching Europa. The mission's success had made its continued existence dangerous to the science that would come after it.
Earth appears to be collecting radioactive stardust from a stellar explosion that happened millions of years ago, and part of the evidence has been frozen in Antarctic ice for tens of thousands of years.
The Soviet Venera landers that photographed Venus between 1975 and 1982 remain on its hot, high-pressure, mostly carbon-dioxide surface; the sulfuric-acid clouds are far above them.
Methuselah, a Great Basin bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of eastern California, has been alive somewhere between roughly 4,668 and 4,857 years.
