Do you ever feel like someone is watching you? They could be. And I’m not talking about the odd neighbors at the end of your street.This summer, at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell…

Let me tell you what it’s like to be an astrobiologist.I painted a white picket fence this summer. No one asked me to. It was a task I’d set myself without realizing what a long-winded…

I walked out of the airlock onto the blood-red Martian surface. My mind was crystal clear and laser focused. There was no room for panic or anxiety as I surveyed the landscape and…

Our human world is soaked in light. For starters there are the 100,000 trillion photons arriving every second at every square centimeter of Earth’s dayside surface, after racing…

As I write this at the end of July, 79 wildfires are burning across 12 states in the U.S. In Oregon, a mammoth fire has engulfed some 400,000 acres—an area half the size of Rhode…

On the dark night of March 13, 1781, William Herschel settled down in his garden observatory in Bath, England, for a routine night of observing stars, when he noticed something out…

Quantum mechanics seems to have a problem with the order of time, which might signal the need for an entirely new type of law.Illustration by Ekaterina Kulaeva / ShutterstockThe history…

1 The “Dataome” Is HugeThe dataome is shorthand to describe all of the externalized information we generate in symbolic representations: drawings, music, books, computing, data…

One of my favorite albeit heavily paraphrased quotes from Albert Einstein is his assertion that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. (What…

If you could soar high in the sky, as red kites often do in search of prey, and look down at the domain of all things known and yet to be known, you would see something very curious:…