NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins tends to radish plants growing for the Plant Habitat-02 experiment.

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our Facts So Romantic blog in May, 2020. In May, the cover of New Scientist ran the headline, “Is the Universe Conscious?” Mathematician and physicist

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Energy” issue in June, 2020. Dear Bella, I’m going to imitate Rudyard Kipling and tell you a just-so story. Kipling was one of

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Intelligence” issue in March, 2020. Dennis Carroll doesn’t mean to sound callous when he says the coronavirus outbreak was predictable. And he

The lights of the city of Boston seemingly spread from a central point in this image taken by the crew of the International Space Station.

An artistic rendering of the quarks and gluons that make up a proton.Illustration by D. Dominguez / CERN In a recent experiment done at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, in Germany, physicist Alexey Grinin and his colleagues came a

Imagine packing all the people in the world into the Great Salt Lake in Utah — all of us jammed shoulder to shoulder, yet also charging past one another at insanely high speeds. That gives you some idea of how

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Maps” issue in January, 2020. On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Outbreak” issue in April, 2020. I’m no stranger to forced isolation. For the better part of my 20s, I served as a

The British government has ordered 100 million doses, enough to vaccinate 50 million residents. (Image credit: WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Before scientists were even sure black holes existed, an Indian astrophysicist did the math behind Einstein's predictions of what would happen if two black holes collided. (Image credit: Namitha Vishveshwara)

A new study looks at ways to make New Year's resolutions succeed. (Image credit: Pixabay)

Even as they touted ambitious proposals to reduce carbon emissions to a national audience, Democratic candidates for president tried to balance the boldness of their plans with the need for simplifying a complex scientific problem to make it palatable to

Olduvai (now Oldupai) Gorge, known as the Cradle of Humankind, is a UNESCO World Heritage site in Tanzania, made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey. New interdisciplinary field work has led to the discovery of the oldest archaeological site in