On November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean left the lunar surface and rejoined Richard Gordon in orbit. Their lunar module's ascent stage was no longer useful, so mission controllers deliberately sent it crashing b...
Read article
Look up from a truly dark place and the Milky Way appears as a pale river of light crossing the sky. That glow is produced by stars so numerous and distant that most cannot be distinguished...
Read
The sky is so reliably blue on a clear day that the color can feel like a property of the atmosphere itself, as though Earth were covered by an enormous blue ceiling. It is not. Air is essen...
Read
Every email, video stream, security-camera frame, cloud backup, online purchase, AI response and sensor reading leaves a digital trail. Multiply those events across billions of people, phone...
Read
If Mars can come within roughly 55 million kilometers of Earth, why does a spacecraft sent there travel something closer to 480 million kilometers — and spend around seven months doing it? T...
Read
You are almost asleep when the floor seems to disappear. For a fraction of a second, your body feels as though it has stepped off a ledge. A leg kicks, an arm jerks or your whole torso jumps...
Read
It often begins so subtly that you wonder whether you imagined it: a tiny flutter under one eye, a faint pulse in the eyelid, then another. A few minutes later you are staring into a mirror,...
Read
You open a social-media app to check one headline. A war update leads to a natural disaster, which leads to political outrage, an economic warning and a frightening health story. Twenty minu...
Read
For decades, coffee has occupied an awkward place in conversations about heart health. It contains caffeine, a stimulant that can temporarily raise blood pressure and make some people feel t...
Read
There is ordinary tiredness—the heavy-eyed feeling after a late night, a long flight or an exhausting week—and then there is the more puzzling question: Why am I tired all the time? You slee...
Read