Last week the White House unveiled the flag for the new branch of the US military, the Space Force. But wait! There’s more: The president also said the US is developing a new “super-duper missile” that will be 17 times faster than the ones we have today. I don’t... Read more

At the University of Toronto, Ted Sargent runs a test kitchen of sorts. His team, composed of researchers and students, develops recipes, measures and mixes ingredients carefully, and then evaluates the aftermath. The concoctions mostly—if not always—turn out to be inedible. Fortunately, though, flavor is not the point. They’re... Read more

Every last particle in the universe—from a cosmic ray to a quark—is either a fermion or a boson. These categories divide the building blocks of nature into two distinct kingdoms. Now researchers have discovered the first examples of a third particle kingdom. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta... Read more

If you think about it, pi is really weird. This irrational number shows up in the craziest places. If you swing a mass back and forth on a string, there’s a pi in there. It pops up in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Einstein’s general relativity, and the interaction between... Read more

The catch is that directly measuring the Hubble constant is very tricky. To do so, astronomers like Riess and Freedman must first find and calibrate “standard candles”: astronomical objects that have a well-known distance and intrinsic brightness. With these values in hand, they can infer the distances to standard... Read more

In doing so, they found GJ 1151, a faint star with a shockingly long-lived emission. GJ 1151 belongs to a class of stars called M dwarfs, which are small, dim, and extremely common; they make up roughly 70% of all stars in the Milky Way. M dwarfs are often... Read more

The broom challenge is back! This fun little trick returns every few years on social media. It’s supposed to show a gravitational alignment (whatever that is) among the planets that allows a broom to stand up by itself. It’s super special and rare. At least that’s what I hear... Read more

Picture a calm river. Now picture a torrent of white water. What is the difference between the two? To mathematicians and physicists it’s this: The smooth river flows in one direction, while the torrent flows in many different directions at once. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine,... Read more

Although the emergence of organoid consciousness, experience of pain, self-recognition and other worrisome traits inevitably comes up in Brainstorm Project meetings, that’s not their central focus—those developments are still too far off. Instead, Lunshof, Hyun and their colleagues want to pinpoint more immediate ethical issues worth considering. Discussions of... Read more

“Pull out your ice picks,” a scientist whispers in the inky twilight. We’re standing on 30 centimeters of ice — a thin veneer that separates us from the deadly Arctic Ocean below — and the ice is trembling. It emits a loud popping sound as a crack starts to... Read more