Through six different Apollo missions, astronauts brought back to Earth 842 pounds of rocks and soil from the moon. While much of this was made available for scientific research and analysis almost immediately, NASA sealed and stored a significant portion. Researchers hoped that future generations would be able to use…

Imagine you’ve lived all your life in a single town, and have no clue how big that town is and how far it stretches. In 2019, that’s an unimaginable prospect. But from an astronomical perspective, that’s exactly our situation—we have no idea how big the Milky Way galaxy is or…

Uranus is arguably the most mysterious planet in the solar system – we know very little about it. So far, we have only visited the planet once, with the Voyager 2 spacecraft back in 1986. The most obvious odd thing about this ice giant is the fact that it is…

Richard Branson began his spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, 14 years ago. In all that time, the company has experienced several highs, and some crushing lows, but it has never actually gone into space. Until now. On Thursday morning, Virgin Galactic’s passenger spaceplane, SpaceShipTwo, and its two pilots managed to top…

Voyager 2, the little spacecraft that could, continues to hurtle outward into the universe, moving around 10 miles away from the sun every second. Those miles have added up over the course of 41 years, taking it past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. On November 5 it finally joined its…

The Earth glows faintly with the bustle of humanity. From far away you can’t pick out individual homes, or even cities, but by tracking the collective photons that our spotlights and streetlights throw out over time, you might be able to get a rough sense of the rise of technological…

With a protective shield of bone and a thick pad of fat and muscle meant to repel burrow-invading predators, wombats have a lot of strange stuff going on with their butt anatomy. A new paper presented this weekend at an American Physical Society conference provides insight into the most enduring…

If you’ve ever tried to fall asleep with one in your room, you know they’re irritating. But in many places, mosquitoes do far more than induce itchy bumps. Thanks to their blood-sucking ways, some species of mosquito transmit diseases from one host to another—contagions like Zika virus, dengue fever, yellow…

For centuries, human beings have wondered about the possibility of other Earths orbiting distant stars. Perhaps some of these alien worlds would harbor strange forms of life or have unique and telling histories or futures. But it was only in 1995 that astronomers spotted the first planets orbiting sunlike stars…

Everyone who was once a child knows the incredible, simple joy that comes from blowing bubbles and watching an ultra-thin layer of liquid bob through the air before bursting apart. While it seems like magic when you’re a little kid, it turns out the mystery behind how bubbles work is…

Right on time, the Atlantic Ocean is waking up as we approach the peak of hurricane season. Conditions are looking more favorable for tropical development over the next couple of weeks, a far cry from the quiet, boring weather we’ve seen in the Atlantic Ocean so far this summer. It’s…

Winter and fall are great times for gadget nerds like us. It’s crummy enough outside that we can stay in and play with gadgets guilt-free. It’s also when manufacturers typically make their big announcements. But this week, Samsung showed off a bunch of new stuff, the latest version of Android…

After 11 years of lawsuits, reviews and delays by the Environmental Protection Agency, federal judges last week ordered the agency to ban chlorpyrifos, a widespread agricultural pesticide derived from a class of chemicals first used to develop World War II nerve agents. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled…

The origin of blue diamonds—some of the scarcest stones in the world—has eluded scientists for centuries. But now, some of the secrets of these ancient gemstones are coming to the surface. After studying minute bits of mineral trapped within the glimmering prisms, scientists discovered blue diamonds form much deeper down…

Cars zipped past at blistering speeds, only slowing to round the hairpin turns etched into the waterfront course in New York City. Spectators lined up at the edge of the roadway, close enough to see the drivers strain against their steering wheels. From that distance, fans could smell the burning…

Ghost particles, otherwise known as neutrinos, are literally everywhere—trillions of them, each with barely any mass at all, are passing through your body right now. But we understand very little about how these particles work. That’s an absolute shame, since they might be key to explaining some of the biggest…

Almost a thousand stone figures—each weighing tons—dot Easter Island, known also as Rapa Nui. These moai have puzzled generations of Western anthropologists over the past two centuries: how were they created, and how were they moved from the places where stone was quarried to the points on the island where…

Apple first announced that it was moving iMessage into its iCloud storage system back at its WWDC event in 2017. It sounds like a simple thing: All of your messages now sync to iCloud and sync across any device you enable, including iPhones, Macs, Apple Watches, and iPads. Before, this…

Organizing an event is stressful—first you have to figure out your guest list, then you need to pick a date that works for as many people as possible, and finally, you need to make all those potential attendees tell you whether or not they’re coming. Instead of calling everyone individually,…

Every time you send an email or text, or even look up a friend’s address on Google Maps, you rely on a digital list of your contacts. But just because you use it all the time doesn’t mean you treat it very well. Many of us let old numbers, needless…