When a building caught fire in colonial America, fire trucks equipped with high pressure water did not arrive to dampen the flames because they had yet to be invented. But fires still needed to be quenched. Consequently, these early Americans borrowed a practice dating back to the time of the Roman Emperor Nero. Full Article »

If a black hole is the senior starting quarterback on your high school football team—dark, handsome, well-known, and admired by everyone—then a neutron star is the starting quarterback’s kid brother, a gangly freshman who marches to the beat of his own drummer and can’t help being overshadowed by the sheer magnitude of his older sibling. Full Article »

When a child cannonballs into a pool, a simple series of waves radiate outward from the point where they plunged in. But if two children jump in at once, they create a more intricate waterscape. Where the two sets of waves meet, they interfere with each other. In some spots, the peak of one wave meets the valley of another, and they cancel each other out. The waves in that location disappear. Full Article »

When people heard in 2006 that Pluto was no longer a planet, many were outraged. The beloved ninth planet, the satisfying conclusion to the list of the solar system’s members rattled off by many a schoolchild, was no longer special. Some accused celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of killing Pluto; Tyson confessed only to driving the “getaway car.” The real villain was California Institute of Technology astronomer Mike Brown, who discovered an object called Eris that’s slightly bigger than Pluto. This observation suggested that Pluto was just one among many other “dwarf planets.” Full Article »

Looking for inspiration in these dark times? Meet the conductor.

In most respects, the conductor is a pretty ordinary bundle of atoms. Peek through the insulating rubber, and you’ll notice him hard at work inside your local lamp cord or power line.[1] The conductor is a transporter—his job is to usher electricity as quickly as possible from where it’s made (say, a power plant) to where it’s meant to be (sizzling through the filament of that local lightbulb).[2] The conductor is able to do this fairly quickly and efficiently, thanks to the arrangement of his electrons. Each of his atoms has an outermost electron level that isn’t completely full, which means those further-out electrons can easily jump between atoms from beginning to end, like square dancers twirling through a line of partners. Full Article »

Nobody realized that something was missing until 1932.

That was the year that Jan Hendrik Oort made a startling discovery. The Dutch astronomer was measuring the speed of stars in our galaxy, and something was wrong with his calculations. Just as it keeps humans tethered to the Earth, and the Earth looping around the Sun, gravity keeps all the stars in a galaxy clustered together. Oort knew that any stars he observed in the galaxy were held in by gravity. But gravity depends on mass, and a lot of gravitational pull requires a lot of material. Yet when Oort measured the speed of the stars and added up all the mass he could see in our galaxy, he found there was too little mass to keep the stars from hurtling right out of the galaxy. In fact, he could only see only one-third of the mass that was necessary. Oort thought he must have failed to account for some dim or hidden stars.   Full Article »

In the 1920s, a group of young women began showing symptoms of a horrific, but unknown, disease. Many developed mouth sores and lost weight. Some found their jaws extending into a cancerous mimicry of a pharaoh’s beard, tumors sprouting from their bones. Their blood cells and body tissues died, causing anemia and necrosis. Full Article »

If you think back to elementary school, you probably remember learning about the states of matter—solids, liquids, and gases. To get from one state to the next, you need to add or remove heat. Cool down water to make ice. Heat it up to make steam. But nature has a funny way of taking the apparently simple—in this case, the states of matter—and doing profoundly weird stuff. Full Article »

It is perhaps the raw and reckless potency of antimatter that so excites us. For Star Trek writers and hack fiction authors alike, the very name, anti-matter, seems less about what it is and more about what it does. Be careless enough to put it together with normal matter and it will cancel out, negate. Even the clinical term for that process is suggestive: it will “annihilate.” And it will do so spectacularly, in a flash of gamma rays. Kaboom. Full Article »