In space, no one can hear you scream — because sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum, but also because you would need some sort of radio relay to carry the message, what with the distances being so extreme. And this goes for any sort of communication. Snapshots of Pluto’s heart, photos from Mars, images of […]
How could someone write a history of time? And how could that person possibly make it brief? Time is a dimension; it is the fabric of reality. Writing a history of time would be like trying to write a history of up, or the history of green. But when I read “A Brief History of […]
The questions that kids ask about science aren’t always easy to answer. Sometimes, their little brains can lead to big places that adults forget to explore. That is what inspired our series Science Question From A Toddler, which uses kids’ curiosity as a jumping-off point to investigate the scientific wonders that adults don’t even think […]
Progress, as they say, is slow. In science, this is often true even for major breakthroughs; rarely is an entire field of research remade in a single swoop. The Human Genome Project took a decade. Finding the first gravitational waves took multiple decades. So it’s hard to overstate the enormous leap forward that astronomy took […]
Before Rep. Jim Bridenstine was nominated to lead NASA, he already had unorthodox ideas about what it should do. In 2016, as one of Oklahoma’s congressmen, he proposed the American Space Renaissance Act, which he called a “pioneering doctrine” that would refocus NASA’s mission. The space agency would concentrate on human spaceflight and “permanently secure […]