Fifty Years Ago, a Grad Student’s Discovery Changed the Course of Astrophysics

By identifying the first pulsars, Jocelyn Bell Burnell set the stage for discoveries in black holes and gravitational waves By Lorraine Boissoneault The dipole array telescope—a mass of wires and poles stretched across an area the size of 57 tennis courts—took Cambridge University students more than two years to build. But after the telescope was finished […]

Generation Ships

When it comes to crossing the vast gulfs between the solar system and other stellar systems, SF writers turn to two main solutions: small and fast1 or big and slow. Perhaps the best known example of “big and slow” is the generation ship, large enough to qualify as a large town or even a small nation, […]

Nuclear Fusion on Brink of Being Realised, say MIT scientists

By Hannah Devlin The dream of nuclear fusion is on the brink of being realised, according to a major new US initiative that says it will put fusion power on the grid within 15 years. The project, a collaboration between scientists at MIT and a private company, will take a radically different approach to other […]

5 Mysterious Space Diseases

Story Review: The Star by Arthur C. Clarke

The Star by Arthur C. Clarke My rating: 4 of 5 stars Read for the 12 in 12 Challenge. This story won the 1956 Hugo for Best Short Story. This, along with A Case of Conscience by James Blish, is a story from a similar period in which the author confronts the apparent opposition of […]

Bacteria Eats Heavy Metals, Excretes Gold Nuggets

By Michael Irving If the goose that laid the golden egg had a real-life counterpart, it would be C. metallidurans. This hardy little bacterium consumes toxic metals and excretes tiny gold nuggets, but how and why it does so has never been fully understood. Now, German and Australian researchers have peered inside the microorganism and figured […]

We Can Navigate Using Pulsars: Where to Now?

By Robbie Gonzales HALF A CENTURY ago, astronomers observed their first pulsar: a dead, distant, ludicrously dense star that emitted pulses of radiation with remarkable regularity. So consistent was the object’s signal that astronomers jokingly nicknamed it LGM-1, short for “little green men.” It wasn’t long before scientists detected more signals like LGM-1. That decreased the […]

TRAPPIST-1 Planetary Atmospheres May Be Habitable

Seven Earth-sized planets orbit the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, 40 light-years away from the Earth [1]. This makes TRAPPIST-1 the planetary system with the largest number of Earth-sized planets discovered so far. These planets are also relatively temperate, making them a tantalizing place to search for signs of life beyond our Solar System. Now, an international team […]

Orbital Infrastructure

Photo of a Single Atom with an Ordinary Camera

A student at the University of Oxford is being celebrated in the world of science photography for capturing a single, floating atom with an ordinary camera. Using long exposure, PhD candidate David Nadlinger took a photo of a glowing atom in an intricate web of laboratory machinery. In it, the single strontium atom is illuminated […]

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