The vacuum of space is a chaotic sea of quantum fluctuations. Some have said that this vacuum energy can be harvested to build our future starship engines, or manipulated to build warp drives. It can't. But it is technically possible to...

Big things are made of smaller things, and those smaller things are made of smaller things still. That’s reductionism in a nutshell, and digging our way to the smallest layer has been one of the primary goals of physics for ever. But...

The mystery of what happens when we go from a superposition to a definite state is known as the Measurement Problem, and it’s arguably the most mysterious outstanding problem in physics. The different interpretations of quantum mechanics...

We’re almost certainly the first technological civilization on Earth. But what if we’re not? We are. Although how sure are we, really? The Silurian hypothesis, which asks whether pre-human industrial civilizations might have existed.

In the far future we may have advanced propulsion technologies like matter-antimatter engines and compact fusion drives that allow humans to travel to other stars on timescales shorter than their own lives. But what if those technologies...

They say fusion is 50 years away, no matter when you ask. Then why are billions suddenly being pumped into fusion startups? Yes to train LLMs, but there's a reason the technobrats are bullish on fusion in particular. The fact is, the...

The biggest news in cosmology in recent years is that the mysterious universe-accelerating entity we call dark energy may be fading away. The evidence for this is now strong enough that enormous effort is going into confirming this...

A few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident detection of pervasive ripples in the fabric of space time that presumably fills the cosmos, detected by watching...

What graptolites tell us is a story of incredible changes in the ocean, of periods where the oceans became poisonous and suffocating before eventually clearing up again. They unlock extinctions and recoveries that scientists didn't see....

While we think we know a lot about dinosaurs – like how they moved and what they ate – for a long time, we haven’t been able to ID one seemingly basic thing about their biology... Which are males and which are females?

Researchers have discovered a piece of a weird, but critical, time in the deep past…a time when the first-ever mass extinction may have turned Planet Earth into Sponge World.

How did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.

Around 6,000 years ago, in the Sahel region of Africa, a lone female mosquito buzzed through the lush, green savannah. She couldn’t know it, but the planet itself was about to change in ways that would see her descendants evolve to live...

The journey the thunder beasts took to reach such mega proportions from such humble beginnings forces us to ask an important question, one that paleontologists have been asking for more than a century: from an evolutionary perspective,...

When did practicing medicine - in its varied, complex forms (from sharing medicinal plants to the earliest surgeries) - become something that we actually started doing? While it’s a hard question to answer, it’s possible that our...

When exactly did we start drinking other things, and why? To find out, we have to look at the world’s oldest beverages – which might not be what you expect.

The rise of the Himalayas affected more than just the immediate area. Turns out, we may have them to thank for everything from the rise of giant flightless birds in Madagascar; to the disappearance of plants from Antarctica; to the...

How and why the giraffe's neck emerged in the first place has been a mystery that generations of biologists have argued over – one that has made us reconsider our understanding of how evolution actually works over and over again.

What happened to the piece of prime prehistoric real estate known as Doggerland? While a massive megatsunami might have drowned it for good, the underlying reason that it now lies under the sea may have actually been the same thing that...

This is the story of how our planet rescued itself from extreme conditions in the Cretaceous Period, at the cost of essentially suffocating the oceans for half-a-million years.

Of course, the ancient Egyptians were probably not the first people to ever wear clothing, but we haven’t found any clothes older than the Tarkhan Dress. So how can we figure out when we first started wearing clothes? Well, it turns out...

Turns out, instead of having bats to thank for the existence of butterflies, the groups we should actually be thanking are…bees and beans.

To get fire, which exists only on Earth, it took billions of years of photosynthesis – which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever since.

Tiny exoskeleton fragments may have allowed some of the most important microbes in the planet’s history to set sail out into the open ocean and change the world forever.