THE LAST TRANSMISSIONStories from the Edge of ScienceSCIENCE ARTICLES / 149 WRITTEN STORIES
Find an illustrated science story, follow a research question, and continue to the full article on Substack. Browse the articles below, or explore our documentary collection .
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All published science articles in date order, newest first. Each entry opens the complete illustrated story on Substack.
Showing 61–90 of 149 articles · Page 3 of 5
Far beyond Saturn, a small world casts a shadow that suggests one ring is growing darker while another is fading. Whatever is happening there may have begun within our own lifetimes.
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The solid inner core may be gravitationally tugging on the rest of the planet, changing the length of our days by milliseconds over decades.
The Big Bang remains one of the greatest successes in science. The unsettling part is what happens when we measure it too precisely.
Moss spores spent nine months exposed outside the International Space Station and most of them still germinated. The experiment does not prove panspermia, but it makes one of its strangest requirement
LHS 1140 b may be one of the most important worlds we have ever found beyond the Solar System, but the closer astronomers look, the stranger the planet becomes.
A strange 43 GeV line from three galaxy clusters and a separate gamma-ray halo around the Milky Way are forcing physicists to ask extraordinary questions.
Earth is overflowing with silicon. Carbon is comparatively scarce. Yet every living thing we have ever discovered is built around carbon, and the reason reaches from the sand beneath your feet to a st
Green peas, blueberries and purple galaxies sound like an astronomy joke. Instead, some of these tiny objects may be giving us our closest look at the galaxies that helped end the cosmic dark ages.
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We grow up believing light is freedom. In reality, it may be the wall that keeps every civilization in the universe alone.
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There is something at the center of every atom in your body so dense that a teaspoon of it would weigh close to a trillion kilograms. The stranger question is why it exists at all.
Scientists watched an invisible warning move through the air and ignite a living plant, cell by cell.
A glass on your desk, a lake under winter ice, an ocean sealed inside a moon. The same molecule may be keeping more than one arrangement within reach.
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A Scottish observatory recorded a persistent frequency that researchers could not identify. Their next test may require an instrument as large as the planet.
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Research suggests Earth's closest planetary twin may still be tearing itself apart, hiding enormous tunnels beneath its surface.
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The spacecraft’s greatest discovery made its continued existence unacceptable
After a century of searching, astronomers have captured their clearest evidence yet of a young blue-white star moving through the atmosphere of the most famous red supergiant in our sky.
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A two-year study found bacteria growing inside radiation fog, dividing in suspended droplets and dismantling formaldehyde as the ecosystem drifted just above the ground
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Scientists have found brain cells that appear to measure how long you have been awake. The stranger possibility is that they may be listening to signals from an ecosystem living inside you.
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Its teeth were hidden. Its tiny arms were the price of an overbuilt skull. And one broken rib preserved the last repair its body ever attempted.
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A hidden dimension could connect dark matter, dark energy, and the strangest weakness in physics. Now the universe may have given us our first clue.
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What voltage really is, where electrical energy travels, and why the empty space around a cable is doing more than the copper inside it.
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A study suggests biology did not arrive fully formed. Part of its metabolism may have assembled inside hydrothermal rock, then completed itself independently along the two oldest branches of life.
Scientists crushed water beneath more than two million atmospheres and heated it beyond iron’s ordinary-pressure melting point. It became a crystal with a liquid moving through it.
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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has barely begun looking at the sky. It has already uncovered a stellar system so faint that it may represent an entire galaxy we somehow failed to notice.
Parker Solar Probe survived the closest encounter any human creation had ever made with a star. Eugene Parker had waited most of his life to hear what it found.
Astronomers finally found the edge of IC 1101. Then they discovered the largest known galaxy is still feeding.
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A scientific review argues that the solar system may have struck interstellar clouds that crushed the heliosphere inside Earth's orbit, exposing the planet to alien gas and intense radiation.
Astronomers thought the Radcliffe Wave was a cosmic oddity. Now they have found an entire hidden architecture of enormous gas structures in our neighborhood.
A radio telescope looked below Saturn’s calm exterior and found something disturbing: the planet may still carry chemical fingerprints from storms that erupted generations ago.
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An experiment suggests ancient proton storms may have warmed a faint world while manufacturing amino-acid precursors at the same time.
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