He is without a doubt the most famous little monkey in all of fiction. Curious George, known for letting his inquisitiveness get him into trouble and then using his ingenuity to get…

Suppose aliens existed, and imagine that some of them had been watching our planet for its entire four and a half billion years. What would they have seen? Over most of that vast timespan,…

Do you ever feel like someone is watching you? They could be. And I’m not talking about the odd neighbors at the end of your street.This summer, at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell…

Jennifer Heldmann laughed when I pointed out that she used the word “unprecedented” five times in a recent paper. “I should have checked that,” she said. But who could blame…

Science is not the massive structure built of facts that you were taught in school—at least not to scientists. What interests scientists is what they don’t know, what remains to…

David McComas has a favorite “astrosphere,” the environment created by a star’s stellar wind as it buffets the surrounding interstellar medium. It belongs to a star named Mira.…

Terri Randall’s hope when she makes films about space exploration—like Chasing Pluto, for example, or Death Dive to Saturn—is that viewers share scientists’ excitement. That…

Do you ever feel like someone is watching you? They could be. And I’m not talking about the odd neighbors at the end of your street.This summer, at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell…

Our human world is soaked in light. For starters there are the 100,000 trillion photons arriving every second at every square centimeter of Earth’s dayside surface, after racing…

On the dark night of March 13, 1781, William Herschel settled down in his garden observatory in Bath, England, for a routine night of observing stars, when he noticed something out…