Science

19 Stunning Photos of The Year’s Biggest, Most Beautiful Moon So Far

This past weekend, the moon ventured as close to our blue marble as its orbit allows. Meaning that at cozy 31,000 miles closer than normal,that supermoon gave us one hell of a show. And fortunately for us, you guys caught it all on film. Yesterday, we asked you, dear readers, to show us the photos…

Science May Have Found a Boron-Based Bucky Ball Replacement

Buckminster fullerene molecules, the naturally occurring spheres made up of 60 carbon atoms, have long been a darling of the nanotechnology industry. But now, scientists have found a similar structure of boron that could prove equally exciting. Researchers from Brown, Shanxi, and Tsinghua Universities in China have discovered that boron can form a molecular cage…

9 Forgotten NASA Concepts For Space Stations That Never Flew

The ISS has been around for 16 years now, and we’re used to the idea of having a permanently-manned station in orbit. But in the decades leading up to its creation, NASA floated dozens of other ideas for a station—some of them prescient, others seemingly ridiculous to our eyes. These images have been around, in…

The UK Is Getting a Spaceport Too

The UK may have a spaceport within four years—and it will likely be in the northern reaches of Scotland. The plan to have a UK spaceport up and running by 2018 is expected to be announced by the government’s science minister this week, with six potential sites—four of which are in rural Scotland, where it…

There’s a New Material That’s So Black You Can’t See It

A team of British researchers has created a record-breaking material, but you might struggle to tell—because it’s so black that you can barely see it. The new material, called Vantablack, is a coating made using carbon nanotubes, which absorbs all but 0.035 percent of visible light. Grown on a sheet of aluminum foil, the coating…

A Pack of Zoo Wolves Escapes…Right Into The Polar Bear Enclosure

Canada’s wildlife is at it again, but this time they’re playing out a classic scene from literature. It’s The Count of Monte Cristo, or perhaps The Shawshank Redemption, zoo style. In The Count of Monte Cristo, the Mad Priest miscalculates the route that his tunnel must take to break him out of imprisonment at the…

How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life on an Airplane

Navigating your way through clueless tourists, grabby TSA guards, and disinterested ticket counter clerks is only half the battle. Once you make it to your seat, you’ve still got an entire flight to endure. Your best airplane strategy is almost always to sleep through the entire ordeal, but how does one sleep effectively while fully…

Tonight’s Supermoon Will Be Almost as Glorious as Next Month’s

Have you heard? There’s gonna be a Supermoon tonight! It’s a very cool sight to see, especially on a clear night. But it’s way more common than you might think. In fact, the next three full moons this summer will be Supermoons. And astronomers are kind of puzzled as to why we seem to only…

Not a jellyfish. Nor a sperm. In fact, this is a cloud formed by a Russian Soyuz rocket as it rose through the thin air of near space on the morning of Tuesday 8 July. The cross, right at the top of the formation, was made by the Soyuz’s four boosters, as their plumes ballooned…

New and Improved Bird Bath, Now With Extra Coyote!

Bird baths aren’t just for birds any more. A crafty coyote at Death Valley National Park decided to escape the heat by squeezing itself into a small bird-sized bathtub. And how could you blame it? The overnight low last night in Death Valley was a “cool” 93 degrees Fahrenheit! The photo comes courtesy the US…

Understanding Chimpanzee Intelligence Can Shed Light On Our Own

It’s hard to study intelligence in humans — our cultures are incredibly complex, and what counts as “smart” is defined as much by our societies as it is by our genes. So some researchers have turned to chimpanzees to understand what actually gives rise to intelligence in the brain. A century of scientific investigation into…

The Plan to Resurrect NASA’s Long-Lost Satellite Has Failed

Someone throw together an IndieGoGo for a 21 gun salute. The crowdfunded project take control of ISEE-3, NASA’s 30-year-old satellite, is kaput. The sad news is a blow to anyone who loves space, science, or stories of redemption by scrappy underdogs. If you’re just joining us, here’s the backstory: ISEE-3 was a satellite launched in…

The Simplest Way to Track Your Sleep Yet

A lot of us suck at sleep. But exactly how do we suck at it? Do we toss and turn a lot? Snore? Are we roused by outside noises? Well, the new Misfit Beddit Sleep System promises to answer those questions. You might remember Misfit as the makers of the Shine—one of the most attractive…

Watch a Researcher Zip Line Over the Door to Hell For Science

The more biologists look, the stranger the places they find life. Whether it’s in the boiling mud ponds of Yellowstone or in radioactive seams miles beneath the surface of the Earth, microbes seem capable of surviving just about anywhere. That’s why one team is heading to the deep desert of Turkmenistan to see if life…

Your Next Pair of Jeans Could Be Designed by Lions and Tigers

You know how trendy it is to wear jeans that look old and beat up, right? Most denim companies turn to sandblasting to get the job done, but a Japanese charity has a new idea: let lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!) do it. We’ll show you how, with gifs. Step one: Wrap denim around…

Tiny Thumb-Sized Hedgehog Lived in Canada 52 Million Years Ago

During the early Eocene epoch, North American mammals were quite different from what we see today. Here’s one example: researchers have just uncovered a 2-inch-long fossilized hedgehog in British Columbia. That’s the size of your thumb. It’s the tiniest hedgehog known to science. The researchers, writing in the most recent issue of the Journal of…

A Rare Tour of the Long-Secret Russian Town Where Cosmonauts Are Born

If you went looking for Zvezdny Gorodok, aka Star City, on a map in the 1960s, you’d have no luck. This small town outside of Moscow was long a state secret, and for good reason: It was the base where Cosmonauts came to train for—and recover from—space flight. And it’s still cooking. “Deep within the…

You get three-for-one in this striking image of Saturn: its north polar vortex and hexagon along with its expansive rings. It was captured by Cassini’s wide-angle camera earlier this year. [NASA]

Buzz Aldrin: The First Humans On Mars Should Never Come Home

Buzz Aldrin was the second man to ever set foot on the moon, and he has some opinions about how things should go down when humans first set foot on Mars. Namely that they shouldn’t come home. Ever. Aldrin explained his stance in an AMA on Reddit today, and it’s not that he’s just pro-stranding-people-on-an-alien-world…

The Alien Brains Living on Planet Earth

To look for aliens, most people peer towards the sky. But if you look down, you’ll discover they already live among us. These aliens have brains, like we do, but they’re mostly inside their arms, and each arm acts as if it has a mind of its own. I’m speaking, of course, of the octopus.…