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A long sought crack in the standard model may finally be here — The future of science, Albert Michelson once said, must be looked for in the sixth decimal place. He was wrong, of course. Yet in 1894, the year in which he spoke, physicists were feeling confident. They had, after much effort, tamed the laws of gravity, magnetism and electricity, explained much…

Rocket Lab plan to use helicopters to catch a falling rocket — SpaceX land and reuse orbital rockets so frequently they almost make it look easy. Even so, no other company has yet managed to do the same. Might that soon change? …

Four decades after our last visit, NASA ponders a return to Uranus — In January 1986, Voyager 2 passed just fifty thousand miles from the surface of Uranus. It beamed back a handful of pictures, discovered ten moons and a magnetic field and then flew onwards, heading for Neptune and interstellar space. …

Fallout from the explosion lingers to this day — In 1971 the US military drilled a mile into the Earth’s crust, placed a five megaton atomic bomb at the bottom of the resulting hole, and lit the fuse. All this was highly controversial — the site, in the remote Aleutian Islands off Alaska, was prone to earthquakes and volcanoes…

An ancient treasure is under threat. If we do not act now, it may be lost forever. — The gods, so the priests told, sent messages with the stars. Venus conveyed the wishes of Ishtar; Jupiter the warnings of Marduk. By watching their motions carefully, as the priests did, the Babylonians could foresee the future, gather the harvest and plan for war. The night sky, of course, is…

The fantastical Russian project to end the tyranny of darkness forever — The idea sounds almost fantastical. A gigantic mirror, sixty feet across, floating hundreds of miles above the Earth. From it a beam of light reflects, tracing a long arc across the planet below and turning night into day. Fantastic, perhaps, but reality — at least for a few moments back…

Meat is about to get a makeover. What happens next could change the way we think about food forever. — It looked like meat. Indeed, according to the gathered food critics, it even tasted like meat. This, however, was no typical burger fresh from the farm. It had been made, at incredible expense, entirely within a laboratory. …

Can we weigh the lightest particle in the universe? — At first physicists thought the neutrino, like the photon, was a massless particle. That, as Einstein told us, allows it to move through the cosmos at the speed of light. Observations seemingly confirmed this fact. …

NASA is paying Jeff Bezos to build the next space station. Is that really a good idea? — Sometime later this decade, or perhaps early in the next one, the International Space Station will die. The end will probably come abruptly: a sudden failure of some crucial component perhaps, or the splintering of the station’s walls; a breach in the barriers keeping life and death apart. Astronauts will…