A Tiny Probe Launching in 2029 Will Spend 80,000 Years Reaching the Nearest Star
The Most Ambitious Journey Ever Planned—With No Expectation of Return Sometime before the end of 2029, a small spacecraft will slip away from Earth and begin the longest journey in human history. It won’t carry astronauts. It won’t send back photos of alien worlds. And…
How a Solar Superstorm Nearly Sent Self-Driving Cars Off Course Last November
A Space Storm With Very Earthly Consequences On November 11, 2025, the Sun unleashed a series of solar flares that struck Earth, triggering a severe geomagnetic storm that peaked for around six hours. While skywatchers marveled at the auroras it produced, engineers and scientists were…
AI Uncovers Six Secret Zones Hiding at the Bottom of Earth’s Interior
A Discovery Hidden in Plain Sight for Decades Over two million waveforms from roughly 5,000 magnitude-6-plus earthquakes had been sitting in seismic archives for decades. Manual analysis had picked through this archive repeatedly — and kept missing something. A deep-learning system developed by researchers at…
When Corn Grows in Space Its Roots Completely Lose Their Way
A Seed in Space Has No Idea Which Way Is Down Plant a corn seed in your backyard and something elegant happens: the roots push down, the shoot reaches up, and order prevails. That elegant simplicity, it turns out, depends entirely on gravity. Long before…
Two Alien Worlds Discovered 337 Light-Years Away — One Burns, One May Harbor Water
A Tale of Two Planets Imagine two planets orbiting the same star, yet existing in almost unimaginably different conditions — one a hellscape of molten rock, the other a temperate world where liquid water might flow. That is exactly what astronomers announced on August 31,…
One Man’s Camera Captured the Largest Glacier Collapse in Recorded History
A Skeptic Watches a Mountain of Ice Disappear In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic — and at the time, he was a skeptic about climate change. For nearly 20 years,…
Ancient Earth Movements Set the Stage for Antarctica’s Deep Freeze
A Mystery Solved Deep Beneath the Ice Some 34 million years ago, when Earth was significantly warmer than it is today, Antarctica froze over — and it would take another 25 million years for ice to cover the Arctic. The question of how the South…
Northern Lights Put on a Show for Nine Border States Last Night
A Quiet Celestial Display Along the Northern Tier Residents along the U.S.-Canadian border got a rare late-summer reason to step outside and look up. On Sunday night, August 31, the aurora borealis had a chance to shimmer over nine northern states, offering a modest but…
Hidden Beneath Utah’s Rubble Lies a Glacier the Size of the Great Pyramid
A Mountain’s Surprising Secret To anyone hiking the trails of Mount Timpanogos in Utah’s Wasatch Range, the sprawling field of loose rock near the summit looks like nothing more than a giant pile of debris. But scientists have now confirmed what lay hidden beneath those…
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Launches on a Million-Mile Journey to Unlock Cosmic Mysteries
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is on track for its upcoming launch, scheduled for 7:26 a.m. ET. The telescope and its Falcon Heavy rocket have been delivered to the launch pad, marking a significant milestone in launch preparations. The Roman Telescope is expected to be one of NASA’s most powerful tools for exploring the universe.
