For more than a century, humanity has been adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at an extraordinary rate.
Burning coal, oil and natural gas releases carbon that had been locked underground for m...
For decades, medicine has faced a frustrating problem: the human body can repair some damage, but not everything.
A broken bone can often heal. Skin can regenerate. The liver has remarkable regener...
Some of the most important discoveries in science have come from instruments that allowed humans to detect what our senses could not.
Telescopes revealed distant galaxies. Microscopes opened the mi...
For millions of years, the human body evolved under one constant condition: Earth's gravity.
Our bones developed to support our weight. Our muscles learned to work against gravity every day. Our ca...
There are places on Earth that humans can reach—but perhaps shouldn't.
A collapsed mine filled with unstable rock. A nuclear facility contaminated by radiation. A burning industrial site. A deep-...
More than 70 percent of Earth's surface is covered by ocean, yet humanity has explored only a fraction of what lies beneath its waves.
Every dive, sediment sample and expedition seems to reinforce ...
There are places on Earth where almost nothing appears to remain of the world that once existed there.
A landscape may look like ordinary rock. A cliff may contain nothing more than layers of sedim...
For centuries, scientific discovery has followed a familiar rhythm.
A scientist asks a question. They develop a hypothesis. They design an experiment, gather materials, run the test, study the resu...
The Moon is entering a new phase of exploration. Governments and private companies are planning missions that could do more than collect rocks and conduct experiments. They could test technologies for...
For decades, the Moon was treated largely as a scientific destination—a place to study, visit and photograph. That view is changing. Scientists and space agencies are investigating lunar water ice, ...
For decades, nuclear fusion has carried the reputation of being the ultimate promise of clean energy: abundant fuel, enormous power and far less long-lived radioactive waste than conventional nuclear ...
For centuries, humans discovered materials by experimenting, copying nature and gradually refining familiar ideas. Artificial intelligence is changing that process. Instead of asking researchers to ch...
Materials have traditionally been designed to be strong, light, flexible, conductive or heat-resistant. But a new generation of engineered materials is challenging those familiar categories. Scientist...
Computers have moved from rooms to desks, pockets and even watches. The next transformation could make computing almost invisible. Researchers are developing networks of extremely small sensors—ofte...
Tiny machines navigating through the human body sound like science fiction, but researchers are already developing microrobots and nanoscale systems that can move, sense their surroundings and interac...
Robots are getting smaller—and scientists are approaching a scale where machines can be measured in micrometers rather than centimeters. These microscopic systems could one day navigate inside the h...