Featured Stories in Science

For 72 seconds on August 15, 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio detected what may have been a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence. It was a narrow-band burst of radio waves, matching no known natural phenomenon, and it stood out like a sore thumb from the ordinary background noise of the cosmos.

NASA’s Voyager Golden Record, launched in 1977 aboard Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, is a time capsule of human civilization, designed to convey Earth’s essence to extraterrestrial beings. Featuring 115 images, greetings in 55 languages, natural sounds, and 90 minutes of diverse music, the Golden Record represents humanity’s first foray beyond our solar system. Though unlikely to be discovered, the record preserves a snapshot of our existence for the distant future.

Taste the past, shape the future. In an effort to spark conversation about the future of food and sustainable meat alternatives, an Australian startup has showcased a meatball made from lab-grown cultured meat using genetic material from the long-extinct woolly mammoth.

It’s obvious to any stargazer on a clear night that we live in a universe vast beyond imagining, glittering with worlds besides our own—and yet, as far as we know, Earth is the only planet to have developed living creatures of any kind. Intelligent life is an unrepeated experiment, with a sample size of one. Could we really be alone?

At the Boomerang Nebula, 5,000 light-years away, a dying star is shooting out gas so quickly that it actually cools down as it expands; the surrounding clouds are barely above absolute zero, making it the coldest place in the universe.

Once a waste product of the automobile industry, fordite—which is pretty much a fancy name for hardened car paint slag—is now a treasured material among jewelry makers and lapidary artists. It’s just too beautiful not to be.

If you’ve ever watched the movie Interstellar, that final scene, at Cooper Station, happens in an O’Neill cylinder. First envisioned by a Princeton professor and his undergraduate students in 1974, it was recently popularized as our preferred way to colonize space. Jeff Bezos fully endorses that statement.

In 1974, British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking predicted that, owing to quantum effects, black holes must constantly emit a small amount of radiation, which should eventually cause them to evaporate—entirely! It turns out he was right.

Even though identical twins share a lot—from their birthday and DNA through their sex and height to their skin, eye, and hair color—remarkably, they do not share the same fingerprints. Here’s why.

The Dyson sphere is an intriguing theory that explores future human capabilities and guides thinking in detecting extraterrestrial alien civilizations.

You’d think answering a simple question like why people yawn would be simple. However, it’s not straightforward despite extensive scientific research.

Scientists now think Earth’s oxygen, dust particles, and the Earth’s magnetotail combine to provide the conditions for Moon rusting.

Ever wondered about horsepower? It’s a game of averages. Let’s delve into the answer to how much horsepower does a horse have.

Standard mirrors are not perfectly smooth due to structural irregularities For this reason most mirrors reflect green light better.

Space blindness is a serious side effect of spending prolonged periods in space. How will scientists solve the problem in time for the expedition to Mars?

From ashes of ox hooves, eggshells, pumice, and myrrh to fluoride and sodium lauryl sulfate, the history of toothpaste has come a long way in 7000 years.

A deafening silence is the absence of sound, but it’s the noise that comes before it that really makes it deafening. You can only appreciate the silence because of the noise beforehand.