Hard Science

By looking down, scientists are looking back in time.

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

There may be unknown particles lurking inside the quantum foam.

Pain relievers like acetaminophen and ibuprofen are made with chemicals derived from oil. Scientists have shown how to make them from trees.

An army of replicators belonging to national laboratories, research universities, and amateur garages is rushing to replicate ambient superconductivity in LK-99.

Rocks and minerals don’t simply reflect light. They play with it and interact with light as both a wave and a particle.

Ultracold gases in the lab could help scientists better understand the universe.

The hunt for the elusive particles continues.

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

The divers spend their waking hours either under hundreds of feet of water on the ocean floor or squeezed into an area the size of a restaurant booth.

In one experiment, the Viking landers added water to Martian soil samples. That might have been a very bad idea.

In a distant galaxy, a cosmic dance between two supermassive black holes emits periodic flashes of light.

From a photon's viewpoint, the Universe is timeless and dimensionless.

The familiar terrain of solids, liquids, and gases gives way to the exotic realms of plasmas and degenerate matter.

In many ways, we are still novices playing with toy models seeking to understand the stars. 

The brightest gamma-ray burst ever observed, GRB 221009A behaved in unexpected ways that might help us understand how they occur.

Neuroscientist and author Bobby Azarian explores the idea that the Universe is a self-organizing system that evolves and learns.

There are 40 billion billion black holes in the universe. Here’s how our Solar System stacks up against ten of them.

We don't know what causes Miyake events, but these great surges of energy can help us understand the past — while posing a threat to our future.

Exoplanet LP 791-18d is likely to have an atmosphere and liquid water.

Gamma-ray bursts are so powerful they could vaporize the Earth from 200 light-years away. Recreating them in the lab is not easy.

The outer planets' clouds hide the weirdness within.

Plants at room temperature show properties we had only seen near absolute zero.

Particle physicists use gigantic accelerators to investigate the infinitesimal.

"Superhabitable" planets might be real, but Earth is probably as good as it gets.

Does humanity have a moral imperative to seed life on lifeless worlds? And should we avoid colonizing a planet if life already exists there?

The cycles of life all rely on the dynamism of the Earth's crust.

A next-generation instrument on a delayed rover may be the key to answering the question of life on Mars.

There may be a symmetrical interdependence between order and chaos.

Archaeologists can learn how societies lived by studying what they left behind when they died. Astronomers are doing much the same thing.