Lab Notes
Crowding the night sky
I
n mid-March, SpaceX launched 60 satellites into orbit 340 miles above the surface of the Earth, part of...
Living with a star
Just after Christmas 2019, a NASA spacecraft soared past Venus toward the inner solar system, and near the end of January 2020,...
Voluntary depopulation
During the first two weeks of December, delegates from around the world are meeting in Madrid for the latest round of international...
Cheating extinction
When a huge space-rock fell from the sky 66 million years ago, it quickly brought an end to the age of the...
Chasing Arctic ice
In late September, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg led the largest global climate strike in history, inspiring 7.6 million people in 185...
Experiencing research
Imagine if you could test-drive your anticipated career before going through all of the effort and expense of obtaining the necessary education....
Forecasting nature
In 1973, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke suggested that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Accurate predictions of the...
Watching stellar heartbeats
In 1966, astronomer Olin Wilson started what would become a decades-long pursuit, searching for an answer to a simple question. Wilson knew that observations...
Making the planet great again
In his 2001 book Who Owns the Sky, entrepreneur Peter Barnes suggests that any system designed to tax heat-trapping pollution must redistribute the revenue...
Discovering Ultima Thule
Four billion miles from the Earth on New Year’s Eve, a spacecraft traveling at 32,000 miles per hour zoomed past a tiny object roughly...
Mining for solar storms
In his recent book Accessory to War, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson and coauthor Avis Lang document the historical relationship between science and the military,...
Bouncing off the satellites
On Oct. 30, NASA finally retired the Kepler space telescope, the prolific planet-hunter that has been scanning the skies for the past nine years....
