The Hunt for Life in Alpha Centauri

This oddball system of three stars might be our best chance at finding nearby life in the Universe.
This artist concept depicts "multiple-transiting planet systems," which are stars with more than one planet.

To Find a New World, Watch How a Planet Dances with Its Star

Finding a tiny planet around bright stars dozens or hundreds of light-years from Earth is extremely difficult.
How Mars may have looked about four billion years ago

How Mars Lost Its Magnetic Field—and Then Its Oceans

Chemical changes inside Mars's core caused it to lose its magnetic field. This, in turn, caused it to lose its oceans. But how?
Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher’s “Musical Ark”

The first algorithmically generated music came to us in the seventeenth century, courtesy of Kircher and his Arca musarithmica.
Loie Fuller

The Serpentine Career of Loïe Fuller

Rising from the ranks of touring comedies and Wild West shows, the American dancer dreamed of a future of light, movement, and metamorphosis.
Plate Tectonics Diagram

How Plate Tectonics Shook Life into Existence

The cycles of life all rely on the dynamism of the Earth’s crust.
The IceCube Laboratory just before South Pole Dawn

“Ghostly” Neutrinos Help Us See Our Milky Way as Never Before

As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery...consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town, South Africa

Although the apartheid era continues to cast its shadow on Cape Town, many of its neighborhoods have been enjoying a renaissance as tourist destinations.
The view south from Viking 2, one of two probes sent to investigate the surface of the planet Mars for the first time, September 6, 1976

We Might Have Accidentally Killed the Only Life We Ever Found on Mars Nearly 50 Years Ago

In one experiment, the Viking landers added water to Martian soil samples. That might have been a very bad idea.
An illustration of Star Trek's USS Enterprise in warp drive

Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible?

The concept of the warp drive is currently at odds with everything we know to be true about physics.