Somewhere on Earth, while you read this sentence, babies are being born and people are dying. Others are crossing national borders, changing the population of one country without changing the population of the planet at all. It makes the wo...
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Near the heart of the Milky Way lies a cloud with a reputation that sounds invented for a science-fiction cocktail menu. Sagittarius B2 contains alcohol. It also contains ethyl formate, an o...
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Imagine putting the entire Solar System on a cosmic scale: the eight planets, every known moon, the asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, dust and the enormous Sun. The result would be absurdly...
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For generations, chemistry books could place bismuth near the end of the periodic table's stable territory. Its naturally occurring isotope, bismuth-209, showed no detectable radioactive dec...
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From the road near Fish Lake in central Utah, Pando looks like an ordinary mountain forest. Thousands of pale trunks rise from the ground. Their leaves tremble in the slightest breeze, turni...
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When Iñupiat hunters and biologists began finding ancient weapon fragments inside bowhead whales harvested in Arctic Alaska, the discoveries posed an extraordinary question: how long had the...
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Listen to some of NASA's most famous recordings from the outer Solar System and space does not sound silent at all. Jupiter whistles, crackles and roars. Saturn produces eerie rising tones....
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Technology is supposed to age quickly. Phones become obsolete, startups disappear, frameworks fall out of fashion and yesterday's revolutionary software becomes tomorrow's migration problem....
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A dashboard can be perfectly accurate and still tell the wrong story. Traffic rises 28 percent, engagement improves, impressions reach a record high and the chart turns reassuringly green —...
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Modern elections are designed to look ordinary. Voters enter a booth, mark a choice, deposit a ballot and wait for arithmetic to produce a winner. In medieval and early modern Europe, choosi...
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