A mirror that moves mid-photon could release a shower of new photons. A photon is a single particle of light, and under normal circumstances, it can’t be divided. But a photon is also not a particle, in the sense that it does not have a specific location. Instead, it…
NatGeo’s Pompeii: Out of Time fuses historical fact and imagination to bring city’s last 24 hours to life. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. It’s one of the most…
A single chemical made by mole-rat queens enforces the social order. Naked mole rats are weird. They spend their lives almost entirely underground, are largely insensitive to some kinds of pain, can persist without oxygen for a long time, rarely develop cancer, and can live past 30 years, which…
The Trump administration is asking the Space Force to do a lot. This will require more launches. It seems as though $5.6 billion wasn’t enough. That was the news from the US Space Force on Friday, when military officials announced they were tripling the maximum value of one of…
“On the first attempt, reaching orbit, I never thought it was possible.” Indian space officials celebrated the debut flight of Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 rocket, India’s first fully commercial satellite launcher, as a “grand success” Saturday after an on-target climb into a 280-mile-high orbit following liftoff from an island spaceport…
Monitoring is expensive and labor intensive. But it helps public health officials stop outbreaks. With summer heat comes pool parties, beach days, backyard cookouts, and, of course, swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. But while insect bites have always been a side effect of time spent outdoors, the species doing the…
American Diabetes Association blocked publication of op-ed articles so the authors posted them as a preprint. Last month, we reported on a troubling incident at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) in New Orleans. On June 5, five leading scientists were ousted for handing out copies of…
New report says our ability to tie weather damages to climate change is improving. Climate change is being driven largely by the greenhouse gases we’ve pumped into the atmosphere, which trap more of the Sun’s energy there. That added energy increases the odds of extreme events: longer, more intense…
If the large, rocky planet is losing helium, then we can infer what is left behind. Most of the gas in the Universe is a mixture of hydrogen and helium. It’s thought that the initial atmospheres of most planets also start out that way. However, over billions of years,…
“We will likely have similar concerns and discussions when China fields its Starlink-like constellation.” One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a “joint plan” by China and Russia to “defeat Elon Musk’s Starlink.” The story was…
