Scientists have found at least three cycles in nature that can be traced back to the alignment of the planets. And while they won’t tell you anything about your love life or personality, by studying them, we can learn about our planet’s...

Astronomer Jean-Luc Margot has come up with a new definition for planets that may help us categorize worlds outside of the solar system, and we may have also discovered a new dwarf planet within the solar system!

While we like to imagine little green men, it's far more likely that life on other planets will be microbial. Planetary scientist Nathalie Cabrol takes us inside the search for microbes on Mars, a hunt which counterintuitively leads us...

Building and launching rockets to learn about other worlds hasn't been great for Earth, but environmental engineers are working on changing that legacy.

Pluto's heart is revealing itself to be a major influence on the dwarf planet’s landscape and atmosphere, and scientists used atom probe tomography (APT) for the first time on lunar soil to study it atom by atom!

Black holes are some of the most extreme astronomical objects out there, but there are some that really standout. Let's look at black holes that grow larger, consume more, and spin faster than the rest.

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. It has no atmosphere and is, as such, covered in craters. It's also incredibly hot but, surprisingly, has water ice hiding beneath its surface.

The hunt for dark matter is still on, and the candidates for it could be primordial black holes as massive as Earth, or axions, as tiny as the smallest subatomic particles in existence!

Every amazing mission you know about today started off as just an idea, and some of 2019’s early phase NIAC concepts could mean big things for our future.

A new study provides mathematical evidence that dark matter could be much older than we thought and we've found a weird glitch in a neutron star.

In this episode of Crash Course Chemistry, Hank discusses what Molecules actually look like and why, some quantum-mechanical three dimensional wave functions are explored, he touches on hybridization, and delves into sigma and pi...

The Apollo program was famous for being risky and expensive. It had a crunched timeline, daring astronauts, and lacked modern tech, and that all kind of makes you wonder… was the Apollo program a bad idea?

TeD Fellow Carrie Nugent is an asteroid hunter -- part of a group of scientists working to discover and catalog our oldest and most numerous cosmic neighbors. Why keep an eye out for asteroids? In this short, fact-filled talk, Nugent...

Many galaxies formed fast after the Big Bang, but about half of them suddenly stopped making new stars and it looks like this is literally because they ran out of gas. And with new instruments and techniques, we are now finding lost...

Want to navigate the solar system without having to buy a spacecraft? Jon Nguyen demos NASA JPL's "Eyes on the Solar System" -- free-to-use software for exploring the planets, moons, asteroids, and spacecraft that rotate around our sun...

Antartica is a cold and isolated place, but intrepid scientists have found ways to make use of its environment, and turn it into one of the ideal places to study our skies.

On July 14, 2015, New Horizons flew by Pluto. Scientists have used the data from the mission so far to uncover active geology, an enormous canyon, a unique case of chemical coloration, and more. What else might we discover as we venture...

We’ve detected seismic activity all around the solar system, from earthquakes to moonquakes, marsquakes to venusquakes. But the most dramatic quakes we know of actually happen on stars!

Dawn is spiraling in for a closer look at Ceres, and researchers have discovered the best evidence yet for active volcanoes on Venus. Plus, check out Venus and Jupiter right next to each other in the sky!

In September 1859, miners following the Colorado gold rush woke up to another sunny day. Or so they thought. To their surprise, they soon discovered it was actually 1am and the sky wasn't lit by the sun, but rather by brilliant drapes of...

Scientists are constantly researching different ways people could potentially live on Mars. Start making your future Martian travel plans with this collection of videos about the unique challenges of putting humans on Mars.

Hank summarizes the exciting news about Planetary Resources, a company with plans to mine near-earth asteroids for precious metals and water, and what these plans might mean for humanity's future in space.

NIAC has awarded their first two grant winners for phase III: optical mining and 3D modeling craters, and researchers are further honing in on how to identify faraway habitable planets.

The sun is obviously a big factor in the earth's weather, but changes in the solar cycle don't always affect our climate in straightforward ways.