Stories by Ron Cowen

Could a predecessor to the phonograph have appeared a century earlier?

Some scientists teach computers to “see” proteins. Markus Buehler is teaching them to hear the compounds instead

Observations by Arthur Eddington vindicated the theory—even though his nation and Einstein’s had barely stopped pummeling each other in World War I

Ears are such terrific pattern finders that scientists are using audio data to detect cancer cells and particles from space

A faint star with an even fainter companion came close enough some 70,000 years ago to perturb distant comets in our solar system

Data from the South Pole experiment BICEP2 and the Planck probe point to galactic dust as a confounding signal

Pedestrians avoid bumping into each other by anticipating when their paths would collide

The merged objects bend light around them into a "fractal" as they spiral each other

Sound waves imitate famed Hawking radiation, energy spit out from the great cosmic sinkholes

The giant "G2" cloud at the center of the Milky Way could be falling in a continuous stream, thereby inhibiting the spectacle that astronomers hoped for

Cosmic dust is crucial to the birth of stars and planets, but how so much of it came to be present in the young universe has been a mystery

The astronomers who announced earlier this year evidence of a signal from the dawn of time now are taking a more cautious stance

Cold rubidium atoms have provided a fresh approach to measuring Newton's big G

It's easier to detect exoplanets around M-dwarfs, the most common type of star in our galaxy, but these worlds also may suffer from a life-threatening solar wind

Two analyses suggest that the signal of big bang ripples announced earlier this year was too weak to be significant

A gas giant orbiting a relatively nearby star rotates every eight hours, its spectrum reveals

The big bang findings strengthen the case for the multiverse and all but rule out a "cyclic universe"

Lead discoverer John Kovac describes his work at the BICEP2 radio telescope and how his career took him there

A beginner's guide to the BICEP2 discovery of primordial gravitational waves

Astronomers say it's the first direct imaging of the long-sought gas filaments stretching between galaxies

NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) recently made the first definitive measurement of a supermassive black hole

A glimpse of the ancient universe hints at how galaxies grew so rapidly

A 10-dimensional theory of gravity makes the same predictions as standard quantum physics in fewer dimensions

Computing technique reconstructs 3D images from single photons reflected from dimly lit object