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Personal technology is getting a bad rap these days. It keeps getting more addictive: Notifications keep us glued to our phones. Autoplaying episodes lure us into Netflix binges. Social awareness cues—like the "seen-by" list on Instagram Stories—enslave us to obsessive, ouroboric usage patterns. (Blink twice if you've ever closed Instagram, only to re-open it reflexively.) […]

Physicists don’t know much about dark matter. They can’t agree on what it’s made of, how much a single particle weighs, or the best way to construct a Play-Doh diorama of it. (How would you do it? Dark matter is invisible—light doesn’t interact with it at all.) Nobody has ever caught a dark matter particle […]

For 20 years, an experiment in Italy known as DAMA has detected an oscillating signal that could be coming from dark matter—the fog of invisible particles that ostensibly fill the cosmos, sculpting everything else with their gravity. Quanta Magazine About Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons […]

Update: SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket on a mission to resupply the International Space Station. Another day, another SpaceX launch. On Monday at 4:30 pm ET, the commercial space company is slated to propel a previously-flown Dragon cargo ship into low Earth orbit aboard a used Falcon 9 rocket. The Dragon spacecraft, which […]

Half a century ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the “butterfly effect” makes long-term prediction impossible. Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the economy or just about anything else) can touch off a concatenation of events that leads to a dramatically divergent future. Unable to pin down the […]

The robot arm hovers over a pile of products before it makes its move, snagging a toothbrush with its suction cup. It holds the product up, waits for the red flash of a barcode scanner, then turns and drops the toothbrush in a cubby hole. Next the arm suction-cups a box of Goldfish crackers, turns, […]

You enter the University of Colorado Boulder's newest research laboratory through the side entrance. The door—which is heavy and white, with a black, jug-style handle—slides open from right to left. Crammed inside are a plain wooden dresser, two chairs, and a small desk, above which someone has taped a mediocre landscape-print (mountains, trees, clouds, etc.). […]

It will start with a flash of light brighter than any words of any human language can describe. When the bomb hits, its thermal radiation, released in just 300 hundred-millionths of a second, will heat up the air over K Street to about 18 million degrees Fahrenheit. It will be so bright that it will […]

Do you like a planet that hasn’t yet melted? Do you like sushi? How about breathing? Then you’re secretly in love with plankton, tiny marine organisms that float around at the mercy of currents. They sequester carbon dioxide and provide two thirds of the oxygen in our atmosphere and sacrifice themselves as baby food for […]

This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Over the years, John Zimmer, the co-founder and president of Lyft, has often pointed to a class he took as an undergraduate as the source of his ideas about environmental sustainability—and by extension, Lyft’s goals to create greener transportation options. The class at Cornell University […]