The inside of every cell in our body is like a crowded city, filled with tracks, transports, libraries, factories, power plants, and garbage disposal units. The city’s workers are…

This past week was the inauguration of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative. Stephen Hawking gave a lecture, media was gathered, and millions of dollars committed. A mural…

How do bees do it? The honeycombs in which they store their amber nectar are marvels of precision engineering, an array of prism-shaped cells with a perfectly hexagonal cross-section.…

The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the tiny 10-19 meter scale that characterizes quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 1026 meters away. In these 45 possible…

“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)1 Jeremy England is concerned about words—about what they mean,…

Infomercialist and pop psychologist Barbara De Angelis puts it this way: “Love is a force more formidable than any other.” Whether you agree with her or not, De Angelis is doing…

On a clear Christmas morning atop Mount Wilson, before the first tentacles of dawn struck the Los Angeles sprawl 5,700 feet below, George Willis Ritchey was capturing the most spectacular…

Space is brutally egalitarian. When you become separated from your lover, the two of you retain no tighter a physical connection than do two lumps of coal. In this way, space serves…

We recognize beauty when we see it, right? Michelangelo’s David, Machu Picchu, an ocean sunrise. Could we say the same about the cosmos itself? Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics…

Physical stress can operate in unexpected ways. For example, it takes more pressure to shoot a cork from a bottle of champagne than to raze a concrete building. If that seems counterintuitive,…