Facts So Romantic

Did you know that there are many scientists who devote their working lives to skillfully charting out the most unassuming chunks of our solar system—chunks that none of our species will…

Would you like to be more rational? Of course you would. Who doesn’t want to behave and think more reasonably? Good news: New research, from Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, suggests…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.What lies beyond all we can see? The question may seem unanswerable. Nevertheless, some cosmologists have a response:…

Did you ever have an imaginary friend? If you didn’t, chances are you know someone who did. Imaginary companions, as scholars call them, are quite common, and aren’t strictly associated…

In a recent experiment done at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, in Germany, physicist Alexey Grinin and his colleagues came a step closer to resolving one of the more significant…

Is Earth unique? Once a grand philosophical question, it has, over the past two decades, become, with the discovery of thousands of planets around other stars—our cosmic cousins—a scientific…

The other night I was out on our street with the neighbors for a socially distanced hang. My two-year-old daughter, mistaking the only street light on the road for the moon, pointed at…

In the late 1650’s, the French polymath and renowned scientist Blaise Pascal, having undergone a religious experience that transformed him into something of a zealot, suggested the following…

Today, December 21, Jupiter and Saturn will appear extremely close to each other in the sky, less than a tenth of a degree apart, about one fifth the width of the full Moon.1 “Conjunctions”…

In a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode from 2007, Larry David and his wife Cheryl and their friends attend a ceremony to celebrate his public donation to the National Resources Defense Council,…