Despite decades of warnings and increasingly devastating disasters, we’ve still made little progress in slowing climate change.
Our longing to turn back the clock has brought us everything from pricey face creams to cryogenic chambers.
In the 1990s, a troupe of hippies spent two years sealed inside a dome. They ended up starving and gasping for breath. As a new documentary tells their story, we meet the ‘biospherians.’
Keep an eye on your toilet bowl (seriously).
A new sign language is developing in the Negev desert and it’s catching linguists off-guard.
In the year 774 AD, an enormously powerful blast of matter and energy from space slammed into Earth. Nothing like it had been felt on this planet for 10,000 years.
Despite a year filled with lockdowns and social isolation, the starry skies of 2020 gave us solace and enthralled us with a parade of eye-catching celestial events.
It is indeed supremely difficult to effectively refute the claim that John von Neumann is likely the most intelligent person who has ever lived.
Science is like a detective story. For astrophysicists, this truism comes with a twist. No other field of scientific sleuthing confronts such a diversity of scales and concepts.
No Gargantua dwells at the heart of stellar cluster NGC 6397. Instead, a few dozen smaller black holes seem to be swarming around in there, throwing their considerable masses around. Two astronomers recently went looking for a monster black hole.
Could life as we know it have begun on Mars instead of Earth? A handful of scientists believe so, and even more think we should at least consider the possibility.
Researchers have been trying for over 60 years to detect dark matter. There are many theories about it, but none are supported by evidence. The mass-energy-information equivalence principle combines several theories to offer an alternative to dark matter.
There was stunning cosmic imagery to feast on in 2020, from Hubble's 30th birthday image to footage of a daring sample grab on an asteroid. Here's our pick of the year's offerings. The Hubble telescope, one of the most important scientific tools ever built, celebrated its 30th anniversary in April.
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Whether or not you’re accustomed to reading physics for pleasure, the Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek’s “Fundamentals” might be the perfect book for the winter of this plague year.
Internet sleuths claim to have decoded a hidden message displayed on the parachute that helped Nasa’s Perseverance Rover land safely on Mars last week.
In 2015, scientists snagged the first detection of a gravitational wave, a ripple in the fabric of spacetime. The achievement marked the beginning of an entirely new field of astronomy and earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Frank Wilczek has been at the forefront of theoretical physics for the past 50 years. He talks about winning the Nobel Prize for work he did as a student, his solution to the dark matter problem, and the God of a scientist.
Engineers hinted they had hidden a code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover. Within hours, puzzle enthusiasts cracked it.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity profoundly changed our thinking about fundamental concepts in physics, such as space and time.
For decades, astronomers, physicists and cosmologists have theorized that the universe is filled with an exotic material called "dark matter" that explains the stranger gravitational behavior of galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Even as mathematicians and computer scientists proved big results in computational complexity, number theory and geometry, computers proved themselves increasingly indispensable in mathematics.
For years, scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of dark matter, an unexplained substance that accounts for the majority of the universe's mass.
The polar vortex is experiencing an unusually long disturbance this year because of a “sudden stratospheric warming.” Bundle up. Rough winter weather is working its way across the United States, with bitterly cold air hitting the Northeast and snowstorms expected along the East Coast next week.
In every bit of nothing, there is something. If you zoom in on empty space and take out all the planets and stars and galaxies, you might expect a pure vacuum, but you'd be wrong. Instead you would find a dynamic scene, with particles sparking to life and disappearing almost immediately.
Three-dimensional supernova simulations have solved the mystery of why they explode at all. In 1987, a giant star exploded right next to our own Milky Way galaxy.