After brutal cuts, can this NASA center still build multibillion-dollar space telescopes?
2025 was a brutal year of budget cuts and workforce attrition at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the home base for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Experts worry Goddard—and NASA’s space science—may never recover
A mighty space telescope is dying. Here’s why it mattered
NASA’s formidable gamma-ray burst hunter is doomed to soon reenter Earth’s atmosphere, leaving a glaring gap in our view of the high-energy sky
If AI can do math, what’s the point of mathematicians?
What happens when machines surpass the most brilliant human minds? Mathematicians are finding out
Where are all the aliens? A new book explores possible answers
Seven Rasmussen, an astrobiologist and author of the new book Cloudy with a Chance of Starships, gives readers a tour of the astonishing science behind modern searches for alien life
Pluto still isn’t a planet—unless Earth’s moon is, too
On the 20th anniversary of Pluto’s infamous demotion, Mike “Pluto Killer” Brown explains why any reversal of that decision would be driven more by nostalgia than science
Has NASA already found life on Mars?
In searches for past and present Martian life, some scientists say we’ve been too cautious to see what’s right in front of us
Four young mathematicians awarded the 2026 Fields Medals
The 2026 Fields Medals recognize breakthroughs in the math of messy fluids, tangled knots, spinning pencils, and more
Particle physics faces its next great decision—and its next frontier
After decades of debate, the scientific case is clear for Europe’s Future Circular Collider, a colossal successor to the Large Hadron Collider. But transforming this megaproject from vision to reality is far from guaranteed
The surprising science history behind New York City’s ticker-tape parades
On Thursday Knicks fans are flocking to Manhattan for a ticker-tape parade. But where did ticker tape even come from?
When science is under siege, history offers a playbook
It’s a complicated time to be a young scientist in America. Lessons from history can tell us what the future might hold
Edison may not have been the first to record the human voice, new evidence suggests
Could a predecessor to the phonograph have appeared a century earlier?
Pluto and the folly of planethood
The problem with Pluto isn’t its planetary or nonplanetary status—it’s our insistence on declaring the world must be one or the other