(March 14, 2024)
Ingenuity, "Ginny" to its friends, will never fly again. The little Mars-based helicopter-drone landed badly on its 72nd flight on Jan. 18, 2024, damaging all four of its carbon...
(February 29, 2024)
"... at a time when our world, the real world, faces serious problems, [scientists] dwelling on multiverses strikes me as escapism — akin to billionaires fantasizing about colonizing Mars." John...
(February 15, 2024)
"The biological definition of sex wasn't designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare." — Paul Griffiths, professor of Philosophy of Biology, University of...
(February 1, 2024)
At first blush, the number of the year we're living in, 2024, sounds pretty uninteresting. First off, it's obviously not prime (a prime number being only divisible by 1 and...
(January 18, 2024)
There are crises and crises, and unless you're an avid science buff, you may not realize that cosmologists — the few thousand researchers whose lives are dedicated to understanding the...
(January 4, 2024)
Smokers trying to quit say they feel like they're giving up a friend." Scott Leishow, professor at the College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University Even since the 1950s, when...
(December 21, 2023)
Charles Messier (1730-1817) was a French comet hunter. Today, scattered around the globe, hundreds of amateur astronomers follow his lead every night, each striving to be the first to discover...
(December 7, 2023)
A year ago, lying in bed at 3 a.m., I had what I think of as my "Putin Moment": I couldn't remember the name of the Russian president. Not...
(November 23, 2023)
"The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow of the nearest strip...
(November 9, 2023)
"You can find many different diagnoses in death certificates, but they're just details. What really kills us is entropy increase." — Sabine Hossenfelder, Existential Physics Along with the Big Bang,...
(October 26, 2023)
If you've ever watched the launch of a rocket, perhaps a Space Shuttle or one of SpaceX's Falcon 9s, you'll have heard the phrase "Max Q." About a minute after...
(October 12, 2023)
Humboldt Bay (Wigi, to the Wiyot people) is actually a lagoon, the largest protected large body of water between San Francisco and Puget Sound. It's about 14 miles long and...
(September 28, 2023)
"I was the most popular man in Oxford for full four & twenty hours." — T.H. Huxley, following his debate with Bishop Wilberforce At 25, Thomas Henry Huxley returned from...
(September 14, 2023)
"It's a wild ride. It's completely unlikely and should not be taken as a model for how scientific discovery ever happens. It's completely ridiculous." — Craig Kaplan, co-author of the...
(August 31, 2023)
"In the ancient Olympics, nobody competed with shoes, you would run barefoot." — Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist Forget the invention of sex, fire, toolmaking, language, agriculture. The real turning point in the...
(August 17, 2023)
Vulcan was the Roman god of fire; he was also ugly. The good news is that he somehow got to marry the goddess Venus, who was something of a catch....