Science

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Chinese astronauts added more debris shielding to the Tiangong space station during a 6.5-hour spacewalk on Friday (Aug. 15), according to state media. Two astronauts from the three-person Shenzhou 20 mission ventured outside Tiangong to do the spacewalk, which concluded Friday at 9:27 a.m. EDT (1447 UTC, or 10:47 p.m. in Beijing). It was at least the second effort for …

Daniel Rothman works on the top floor of the building that houses the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, a big concrete domino that overlooks the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rothman is a mathematician interested in the behaviour of complex systems, and in the Earth he has found a worthy subject. Specifically, Rothman …

If you think of helium, you are probably thinking of party balloons and squeaky voices. That doesn’t do the element justice. It has a large number of technical and industrial applications, and is the second most common element in the universe. On Earth, though, it is pretty scarce, and the fact that it is lighter than air and doesn’t react …

The northern part of the United States could get a chance to see lights in the sky Monday night, when the view line for the auroras lands on the Oregon-Washington border. The planet is still experiencing “solar maximum” of solar cycle 25, an approximately 11-year cycle of magnetic activity coming from the sun. Solar maximim will last into 2026 and …

The sky at night. It inspires awe. It inspires thoughts of an existential nature: Who are we? Why are we here? And, perhaps most importantly of all, in which direction should I roll this big ball of shit? That is, if you’re a dung beetle. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to …

I recently attended the 40th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, an event that has ballooned from a niche government-industry gathering into a global spectacle that drew over 15,000 attendees in 2025 including entrepreneurs, policymakers and even Hollywood influencers. Ten years ago, in my 2015 op-ed penned after the Space 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley, I described the aerospace sector as …

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Put them together and you get a remarkable puzzle. Black holes devour stars and interstellar gas. This causes them to grow. But they also turn into quasars, excreting blasts of raw energy back out into space, sparking another cycle of star formation. So which came first? Is a black hole a chicken? Or an egg? “With this latest find, we …

Houston, we have a problem. Junk Science In a major blow to climate change science, NASA is officially not continuing its work studying global warming and will instead just stick to space exploration. During a Fox Business news segment, acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy (who also happens to be the Secretary of Transportation) dropped the bombshell during a live interview …