AI Can Speed Up Drug Discovery. Why Does It Still Take Years To Get A Medicine To Patients?
A promising new medicine can spend years moving through laboratories, clinical trials and regulatory review before it ever reaches a patient. Artificial intelligence is now being used…
In 1971, Alan Shepard Took A Golf Club To The Moon. NASA Almost Said No
In February 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard stood on the Moon in a bulky pressure suit, reached into a tube sock and pulled out something nobody…
If The Sun Suddenly Disappeared, Earth Would Not Know For 8 Minutes And 20 Seconds
If the Sun suddenly disappeared, life on Earth would continue normally for a little over eight minutes. The sky would still look familiar, sunlight would still reach…
169 Days, 3 Continents And 22,000 Miles: The 1908 Race From New York To Paris
On a cold February morning in 1908, more than 250,000 people crowded Times Square to watch six automobiles begin a journey that sounded almost impossible. Their destination…
How 100 Sailors Lived For Weeks Inside A Nuclear Submarine
For weeks at a time, about 100 sailors lived inside a steel submarine beneath the ocean, with no windows, almost no personal space and nowhere to simply…
Scientists Discover 9 New Deep-Sea Sponge Species In Alaska, Revealing A Little-Known Underwater Ecosystem
Scientists have identified nine previously unknown species of deep-sea sponges in Alaska, adding to a growing picture of how much life remains hidden beneath the North Pacific….
For 21 Years, This Scientist Studied His Wife. Their Work Helped Create The Pap Smear
Mary Papanicolaou did something almost unimaginable by modern standards. For roughly 21 years, she allowed her husband, scientist George Papanicolaou, to collect samples of cells from her…
The “Waste” From Nuclear Reactors Could Power America For Decades. So Why Don’t We Reuse It?
Every nuclear power plant produces something that sounds like the ultimate dead end: spent nuclear fuel. The fuel is intensely radioactive, generates heat and must be stored…
The Moon Landing Happened. So Why Do People Still Think It Was Fake?
On July 20, 1969, more than half a billion people watched as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon. The United States had achieved what had seemed impossible…
Voyager 1 Has Been Flying Since 1977. Soon, It Will Be One Light-Day From Earth
In 1977, NASA launched a small spacecraft toward the outer planets, never knowing that it would eventually travel farther from Earth than anything humans had ever built….