Constellations
The warmth of the sun on your skin began its journey up to 100,000 years ago
The sunlight warming your skin this morning began as energy deep inside the sun long before any of us were alive.
Space & Missions
The International Space Station is travelling at 17,500 mph as you read this, and…
The numbers are real, the effect is measurable, and the gap between an astronaut's clock and yours has been verified to within picoseconds — but the story of why this happens is stranger than the headline.
Science & Engineering
The cells in your eyes that detect light are technically part of your brain, pushed…
Photoreceptors in the human retina are central nervous system neurons that grew outward from the forebrain during the fourth week of embryonic development. When starlight hits your eye, it is striking brain tissue directly.
Constellations
Astronomers have spent decades modeling what triggers dwarf nova outbursts
A binary star system locked in a tight 1.81-hour orbit is forcing astrophysicists to reconsider how matter behaves when trapped between ultracompact stellar remnants.
Space & Missions
A cargo Dragon just flew its sixth mission to the ISS
SpaceX launched its 34th cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station on May 15, and the Dragon capsule on top of the Falcon 9 was flying its sixth trip to orbit.
Human Behaviour
Rubin Observatory will sift 10,000 comets from a decade of nightly sky imagery…
Rubin Observatory's automated pipelines pulled an interstellar comet out of pre-discovery sky imagery within days; a flagship US military hospital left 1,300 facial CT scans unread for five years. The same archival-image problem has been solved in one domain and remains chronic in another.
Space & Missions
The big three carriers just agreed to do something they've never done before
The three largest U.S. wireless carriers have agreed in principle to form a joint venture for direct-to-device satellite connectivity, a move that satellite…
Constellations
The Pentagon is quietly dismantling the agency that built York Space Systems into a…
The Pentagon experiment that launched a generation of commercial space contractors is ending.
Space & Missions
Saturn's rings are disappearing — NASA estimates they'll be gone within 100 million…
The figure most people remember from the 2018 ring rain study is the Olympic swimming pool.
Science & Engineering
Greenland sharks can live for more than 400 years
The Greenland shark has become a fixture of popular science writing in the way of a small number of charismatic creatures: the immortal jellyfish, the deep-sea tube worm, the bristlecone pine.
Space & Missions
The moon is moving away from Earth at 3.8 centimetres per year
The geometry that makes a total solar eclipse possible is a coincidence with an expiration date, and the Moon is drifting out of the alignment 3.8 centimetres at a time.
Space & Missions
The two Voyager probes are slowly running out of power, and the engineers keeping…
Both Voyager spacecraft are now operating with the smallest sets of active science instruments in their nearly 49-year history.
Space & Missions
Apollo 11’s guidance software couldn’t be patched at the last minute
Apollo 11 launched on 16 July 1969 with a 70-pound guidance computer and a flight program that was already physically committed to copper wire.
Space & Missions
NASA just put a 30-day clock on a $700 million Mars contract, and the deadline…
NASA's Mars relay infrastructure is dying, and the agency just put a 30-day clock on finding a replacement.
Human Behaviour
Europe launches a new mission to image Earth's magnetic shield in 2026 while the…
Europe is preparing a new spacecraft to image the magnetosphere in 2026, even as the operational sentinel warning of solar storms remains a 1995 satellite running nearly three decades past its planned retirement. The gap raises a structural question about how science agencies fund discovery versus continuity.
Earth & Life
What Mars Express just photographed in Shalbatana Vallis isn't just an ancient…
The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter has returned a fresh portrait of one of the Red Planet's most dramatic flood-carved regions, revealing a…