History of Science

Has burning natural gas instead of coal helped the U.S. economy decarbonize? It's complicated

Private funding for the Arecibo Observatory—the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world—may be a poison pill

With a $100-million donation, billionaire Yuri Milner plans to revolutionize the astronomical quest to find alien life

China’s current rank of eighth in the space race is misleading. The nation’s engineers are drawing up plans for a moon-capable rocket more powerful than the U.S.’s Saturn 5

Iran’s attempt to develop nuclear weapons will not be the last challenge faced in a journey that began with the world’s first fission bomb test during World War II

High-resolution images of the icy worlds reveal towering mountains, yawning canyons and perhaps hints of a subsurface ocean

At 8:52 P.M. Eastern time, July 14, 2015, an all's-well signal from the New Horizons spacecraft finished its 4.5-hour, three-billion-mile trip from near Pluto through the solar system to alert mission control on Earth that it was in working order and had succeeded in gathering data

At just before 7:50 A.M. today, July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto. After a 9.5-year, three-billion-mile voyage, the ship got within about 7,750 miles from the surface

Early this morning, if all has gone well, the first golden age of interplanetary exploration will have come to a close

We spend so much time on standardized testing and measuring learning ability that we don’t track how much we’re developing the key competencies that enable us to imagine what could be

Today would have been my mentor's 80th birthday. Happy Birthday Nick and thanks for showing me that mentors really do matter.