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Yesterday, in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson analyzed a trio of recent books on humanity’s future in the larger cosmos. They were How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Space Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight; Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets; […]

In more ways than one, the tingles seem to be fading. Just a few years ago, autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), a puzzling and blissful sensation, became the sudden focal point for a sizable Internet community. Practitioners liken it to a current of electricity running down the scalp and spine. Audiences marveled at online videos, […]

Want to hear a seamy insider secret from the science communication industry? The border between journalism and public relations has more turnstiles than Grand Central. Professionals move with relative ease, and little stigma, between newspapers, websites, and magazines and what would otherwise be called propaganda centers—university communication departments, government agencies, corporate PR arms, military research […]

Sure, dolphins use sonar, whiz through the ocean at incredible speeds, and battle sharks. But can they chat? Last week, a study published in Russia’s St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics claimed to have recorded two dolphins doing just that. Two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, named Yasha and Yana, exchanged a series of vocal […]

A few months ago, my aunt sent her colleagues an email with the subject, “Math Problem! What is the answer?” It contained a deceptively simple puzzle: She thought her solution was obvious. Her colleagues, though, were sure their solution was correct—and the two didn’t match. Was the problem with one of their answers, or with […]

When Lauret Edith Savoy first heard the word “colored” at five years old, she saw herself as exactly that—full of veins as blue as the sky. Not long after, she learned another definition, steeped in racism. “Words full of spit showed that I could be hated for being ‘colored,’” she writes. “By the age of […]

A black hole is a physicist’s playground: A place where some of the most bizarre and fundamental concepts in physics can be observed and tested. However, there is currently no way to directly observe black holes in action; these bodies of matter don’t emit the sort of radiation, like light or X-rays, that telescopes are […]

The 1980s at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory seemed to outsiders like a golden age, but inside, David Chapman could already see that winter was coming. As a member of the lab, Chapman was the first researcher to apply the mathematics of computational complexity theory to robot planning and to show mathematically […]

The new moon night was dark and rich in stars. The line at the bottom of the steps was 200 deep and growing. This was a busy public night at the Martz/Kohl Observatory atop Robin Hill, in Frewsburg, New York, and the rickety old ladder up to the eyepiece of our biggest ‘scope was getting […]