Billions of years ago, Earth transformed from a young, chemically active planet into a world capable of supporting life. Scientists cannot travel back in time to watch it happen—but laboratories are...
They are not full-sized organs, and they cannot simply be transplanted into a patient. But tiny laboratory-grown structures that resemble human brains, hearts, kidneys and intestines are giving scient...
For decades, the search for extraterrestrial life lived somewhere between serious science and science fiction. Today, powerful telescopes, robotic missions and increasingly sophisticated instruments a...
For decades, scientists have learned how individual cells work. Now they are trying to understand something far more complicated: how cells talk to one another. If researchers can decode those convers...
The next 20 years could look surprisingly different from the world we know today.
Not because scientists have one magical invention waiting in a laboratory, but because dozens of scientific fields ...
There is a garbage problem above our heads.
It is moving at thousands of kilometers per hour.
Old satellites.
Abandoned rocket stages.
Broken spacecraft.
Fragments created by collisions...
Look around almost any landscape and it is easy to assume that the important geology is happening on the surface.
Mountains rise.
Rivers cut valleys.
Volcanoes erupt.
Earthquakes shake cit...
From the surface, some of the driest places on Earth look almost completely lifeless.
The ground is cracked.
The air is dry.
Vegetation is scarce.
Rain can be rare enough that years may pa...
For decades, solar power has followed a deceptively simple formula.
Sunlight hits a panel.
The panel converts some of that light into electricity.
The electricity powers homes, factories, veh...
For decades, 3D printing was associated with plastic prototypes, mechanical parts and futuristic manufacturing.
Now the technology is moving into a far stranger territory.
Scientists are printin...
Imagine scratching the surface of a car and watching the mark slowly disappear.
A crack appears in a bridge component, but instead of spreading, the material closes the damage.
A phone screen de...
For most of human history, manufacturing meant machines.
Factories transformed metal, plastic, glass and chemicals into useful products. Engineers designed machines, workers operated them and incre...
What if your brain could send you an early warning — long before you noticed anything was wrong?
Not through a memory test.
Not through a brain scan.
Not through a doctor's examination.
...
The human brain is not simply a larger version of an animal brain.
It has an unusual architecture, extraordinary energy demands and an ability to build complex internal models of the world that has...
A living cell looks deceptively simple.
Under a microscope, it can appear as little more than a tiny membrane floating in liquid.
But inside that microscopic boundary is an extraordinary machine...
For decades, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has followed a simple idea.
Point a powerful telescope toward the sky.
Listen carefully.
Wait for a signal that doesn't look natural....