In Einstein’s relativity and the Standard Model, we only have three spatial dimensions. But there could be more, and many think there are. — From any point in space, you are free to move in any direction you choose. No matter how you orient yourself, you can travel forwards-or-backwards, up-and-down, or side-to-side: you have three independent dimensions that you can navigate. There is a fourth dimension: time; we move through that just as inevitably…

Capacitors, acid batteries, and other methods of storing electric charges all lose energy over time. These gravity-fed batteries won’t. — Back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, humanity had a golden window to revolutionize how we handled energy all across the globe. The dangers of global warming and global climate change — directly resulting from our burning of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere —…

Humanity’s newest, most powerful space telescope is performing even better than predicted. The reason why is unprecedented. — On Christmas Day, 2021, astronomy forever changed with JWST’s launch.

Individual space telescopes, like Hubble and JWST, revolutionized our knowledge of the Universe. What if we had an array of them, instead? — Out there in the deep, dark recesses of space are mysteries just waiting to be discovered. While the advances we’ve made in telescopes, optics, instrumentation, and photon efficiency have brought us unprecedented views of what’s out there, arguably our largest advances have come from going to space. Viewing the Universe…

The information we have in the Universe is finite and limited, but our curiosity and wonder is forever insatiable. And always will be. — For hundreds of thousands of years — nearly all of human history — we had no definitive answers to some of the biggest existential questions we could formulate. How did humans come into existence on planet Earth? What are we made of, at a fundamental level? How big is the…

It isn’t just identical particles that can be entangled, but even those with fundamentally different properties interfere with each other. — In the quantum Universe, things behave very differently than our common experience would suggest. In the macroscopic world we’re familiar with, any object we can measure appears to have intrinsic properties that are independent of whether we observe it or not. We can measure things like mass, position, motion, duration…

The last naked-eye Milky Way supernova happened way back in 1604. The next one could be the key to solving the dark matter mystery. — In all the Universe, there are few mysteries that loom as large as dark matter. We know, from the gravitational effects we observe — at all times and on scales of an individual galaxy and upwards — that the normal matter in our Universe, along with the laws of gravity…

Most globular clusters appear to form their stars all at once, but there are exceptions. JWST just observed how “second formations” happen. — Over half a year since its first science image was released, JWST’s data continues to educate us.

Here on Earth, the Sun is our primary source of light, heat, and energy. But it also poses a grave threat to human civilization. — For life on Earth, there’s no more important source of energy than the Sun; without it, it’s doubtful that life would have arisen on Earth, and it certainly wouldn’t have evolved to give rise to the wild diversity of biological organisms seen today. …