Wandering around Milan, you come across two kinds of power: the kind you can observe and the kind you can only feel. That first one is obvious, all incense-soaked architecture…
Margaret Hamilton, who coined the term “software engineering” and led the development of onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s, died last week at the age of…
Writing about quantum entanglement is always a challenge. There are so many clichĂ©s to avoid: It’s mysterious, ghostly, spooky, and weird. Entanglement is none of those things, and yet it…
Successfully sending Artemis II astronauts on their historic lunar flyby earlier this year required some of the latest and most precise technologies, but not everything in this mission needed the…
Just over 40 years ago, what began as a routine safety test at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (or Chornobyl in Ukranian) in Soviet Ukraine spiraled into one of the…
Timekeeping has officially entered its nuclear age. Two independent teams, one in Vienna, Austria and another in Beijing, China have built working thorium-229 nuclear clock prototypes. Rather than track changes…
Life is remarkably selective. Life relies on many molecules with what is termed “handedness”—they’re chemically identical but are mirror images of each other. Most chemical reactions will make a 50-50…
She’s bubblegum pink with a permanent little smile. She sports a pretty flower on her head sports a black tattoo on one of her eight arms. But don’t let this…
For the first time since 2019, Union Pacific’s Living Legend No. 844 will be hitting the rails with Big Boy No. 4014. These historic locomotives will be together for a…
It’s no surprise that NASA’s new tack toward foreign partnerships—good deals only, please—is challenging preconceived notions of international cooperation in space. Without a massive budget hike, the US space agency’s…