Space is famously cold. The number repeated in textbooks, documentaries and trivia lists is about 2.7 kelvin, or roughly −270.4 °C — less than three degrees above absolute zero.That number is real and extraordinarily well measured. NASA's C...
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Science-fiction space battles have trained us to expect a particular soundtrack: engines roar, lasers crack and exploding spacecraft detonate with a cinematic boom. Put the same battle in th...
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Imagine taking the mass of a mountain and compressing it until its boundary is smaller than an atom. There would be no miniature rocky mountain inside, no visible sphere and certainly nothin...
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Imagine two identical buildings on the same street. One has a broken window that is repaired the next morning. The other has a broken window that remains shattered for weeks. Graffiti appear...
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Put a slice of aged cheddar in a hot pan and things can become unpredictable. It may soften beautifully, but push the temperature too far and orange oil can pool around clumps of tightening...
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On the evening of May 17, 1884, New Yorkers witnessed a sight strange enough to compete with the bridge beneath it. A procession of circus animals moved across the East River from Manhattan...
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The James Webb Space Telescope is often introduced through spectacular pictures: glowing stellar nurseries, delicate shells of gas, galaxies from the young universe and strange worlds orbiti...
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Stand on a beach and the ocean looks almost two-dimensional: a glittering surface stretching to the horizon. The reality underneath is closer to an inverted mountain world. Plains, ridges, v...
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There is a place on Earth where Mount Everest could be lowered beneath the waves and its summit would still remain underwater. It lies in the western Pacific, in the Mariana Trench, where th...
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Look up on a clear night and the most obvious feature of the universe is not the stars. It is the darkness between them. That darkness seems perfectly ordinary, yet for centuries it posed a...
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