Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and reaching for your phone. You tap your favorite social media app, but nothing loads. You try opening your email, searching on...
Polyhedrons come in all shapes and sizes. Anything that has multiple faces joined at their edges can be a polyhedron. Picture Earth as a six-sided cube. Or as a...
Death and the possibility of an afterlife have fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists throughout history. Fear, hope, dread… these are all things we...
It’s a warm summer evening and you’re enjoying a barbeque with your family and friends. The sunny skies suddenly turn dark as a storm blows in. You hear thunder and know...
When people picture AI going wrong, they picture the film version. Robots in the streets, computers waking up, humanity ending up in service to its own inventions...
Imagine boarding a one hour flight with your mother on Christmas Eve. You’re 17 years old. The holidays are here. In just a little while, you’ll be...
Space has lots of different things in it. Planets, nebulas, asteroids, the list goes on. So what would happen if we got rid of a single planet? Specifically, our largest...
MSN New, Cosmos
A Hole in Earth’s Magnetic Shield Is Drifting and Splitting in Two, and Satellites Are at Risk
There is a weak spot in the magnetic shield protecting our planet, and it is not staying still. It drifts slowly westward, and measurements suggest it may be splitting...
Caledonian crows like 007 show problem-solving skills well beyond what survival might demand. They fashion tools out of twigs and sticks to reach food. And they can be...
Flesh-eating bacteria? Uh oh … you may want to have a seat. This is going to be a doozy. It turns out that you’ve got a problem. You’ve become a walking buffet for an...
MSN New, Cosmos
10 Times Earth’s Gravity, 200°C Oceans, and a Planet That Could Destroy Earth’s Orbit
Jupiter is old. Like 4.5 billion years old. It started as a swirling disk of gas and dust that formed into a pretty big planetary core. With time, Jupiter’s core...
From mastering the energy of planets to reshaping entire universes, the path to a Type VI civilization stretches the limits of human imagination. But what would that...
Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing space dust floating around it. Maybe broken-off parts of the moon are raining down on Earth. You’d wonder what happened;...
Here is the number that quietly kills the whole idea. Modern prisons are built to hold thousands of inmates at once. Alcatraz was never close to that, and even after...
Intelligence is a hierarchy. For all of human history, we have sat comfortably at the top. We are not the fastest or strongest species, but our intelligence made us the...
Volcanos, the ultimate natural force of destruction. They’re unforgiving, uncompromising and unstoppable. About 1,500 volcanoes around the world are considered to be...
The Solar System seems calm, but that tranquility is more fragile than it appears. Now imagine one day looking up and noticing something unfamiliar in the sky. A tiny...
Earth can be full of extremes. But today, there is only one extreme. Non-stop earthquakes that last an entire year. What would it be like to live under such shaky...
See that strip of stars splashed across the night sky? That’s our home galaxy, the Milky Way. You can see it from Earth because we live on its very outskirts, far...
Once that missile launches, you can’t escape what’s coming next. But what are you facing? Four types of energy are about to be unleashed. First, a blast wave...
