As we reached a summit of the Swiss Alps at an altitude of 2 kilometers above sea level, the bright Sun burned up small clouds below us…

The culture of superficial toxicity poses an existential threat to curiosity-driven innovation in science. This culture is fueled by social-media mobs, whose members use the megaphone of blogs and tweets to amplify hate towards professional scientists who are following the traditional practice of evidence-based research. Why would the critics do…

The OSIRIS-REx mission collected 70.3 grams of rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu and delivered it back to Earth on September 24, 2023. Given its diameter of half a kilometer, the escape speed from the surface gravity of Bennu is 18 centimeters per second. This means that even the…

The Paleozoic Era, between 541 and 252 million years ago, was a remarkable time for new life on Earth. It started with the Cambrian explosion, being the largest diversification event of life forms in Earth’s history, leading to lush rainforests, the emergence of fish and eventually the transition of amphibians…

What would have happened if a billion people on one side of Earth decided to jump up at the same time? A ten-centimeter jump would kick the Earth in the opposite direction and displace temporarily the rock’s center of mass by roughly the size of an atomic nucleus. When the…

We live in an unfortunate time when the social media megaphone is in the hands of unreliable people with agendas. Doing the hard work of science is ridiculed by lazy critics who have an opinion. Lately, some of these commentators promoted the claim that the spherules we collected in an…

The neutrino is an electrically neutral particle that interacts only through the weak interaction and gravity. If our eyes were sensitive to neutrinos, what would we see? First, the Sun would shine at our eyes all the time, because the solar neutrinos pass through Earth unimpeded. As a result, there…

By now, I had written more than a thousand scientific papers, five hundred essays and eight books. In a conversation with graduate students of the Harvard Astronomy department, I explained that signs of gratitude are far more common regarding my writings for the public. Strangers routinely approach me in public…

On Friday, October 20, 2023 at 7:43:20 PM Eastern Time, the advanced set of microphones of the Galileo Project observatory at Harvard University recorded a strange sound. The signal did not resemble the sounds of birds, aircraft or wind, which were recorded many times before. …