How Vaccines Work, Explained Simply
Training the immune system on a harmless version of a threat. The different types do it differently.
Category: Science
480 posts
The Grid Needs Storage More Than It Needs Generation
Solar and wind are cheap. Making them useful when the sun sets is the remaining problem, and it is a storage problem.
Why the Sky Is Blue, and Why Sunsets Are Not
One phenomenon explains both, and the explanation most people half-remember is slightly wrong.
Asteroid Mining: The Numbers That Kill the Business Case
The resources are real and the arithmetic does not work. Here is what would have to change.
A 190-Year-Old Museum Specimen Revealed a Species Nobody Knew Existed
DNA from an old collection confirmed a distinct Himalayan pangolin, hiding in plain sight across Nepal and northern India.
Data Centres in Orbit: The Idea and the Obstacles
Abundant solar power and no land use make orbital computing sound attractive. Cooling in vacuum is where the argument gets difficult.
The Material That Cools Itself Without Using Any Power
Passive radiative cooling surfaces get colder than the air around them by radiating heat straight into space. No electricity involved.
More Than Twenty Lunar Landings Are Planned Before 2029
The foundations of a permanent lunar presence are being laid by robots, in a wave of missions that gets far less attention than crewed flights.
Voyager 2 Was Running Out of Power. Engineers Bought It More Time
Nearly half a century after launch, a team found a way to keep a spacecraft alive using hardware nobody expected to still be running.
The Roman Telescope Will Photograph the Sky a Hundred Times Faster
NASA's newest space observatory covers an area of sky in one shot that Hubble needs a hundred exposures to capture.