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 121–149 of 149 articles · Page 5 of 5
The Alzheimer’s scandal was not just about fake images. It was about broken trust, wasted years and tax payers money, and patients who deserved better.
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Thomas Midgley Jr. was celebrated as an inventor. History remembers him as something much darker.
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What if first contact isn’t a greeting from the stars, but a warning from a civilization that didn’t survive itself?
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What if the universe is full of life that never gets a sky? Why Earth may be rare not because it has water, but because it has land.
The cells were immortal. The mistake was almost impossible to kill.
The most terrifying answer to “Where is everybody?” may be that they’re already here, and deliberately refusing to answer.
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How the modern food system turned abundance into a countdown clock.
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The Biological Great Filter may be the darkest answer to the Fermi Paradox.
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A dark science timeline of banks freezing, hospitals failing, supply chains breaking, and civilization discovering it built everything on a fragile hidden network.
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What happens when the lights go out is not the scary part. What happens after is.
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A civilization does not need to build something evil to destroy itself. It only needs to build something that keeps going.
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False vacuum decay is a real idea in quantum field theory. It suggests the universe may be sitting in a temporary state, and if that state changed, the laws of physics could change with it.
In 1977, a radio telescope heard something for 72 seconds. Nearly fifty years later, the most frightening question may not be what sent it, but whether humanity should ever answer.
What if the silence between the stars is not emptiness, but a warning?
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Astrophage from Project Hail Mary may be fictional, but the reason it feels so disturbing is that almost everything about it follows a rule.
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One bends space around a ship. The other turns spacetime into infrastructure.
A dark science documentary about Death Star physics, relativistic kill vehicles, antimatter, Nicoll-Dyson beams, and the terrifying difference between impossible and merely difficult.
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If a Carrington-level solar storm was heading for Earth with 18 hours of warning, what should we shut down first?
If an asteroid had a real chance of hitting Earth in six months, would you want the public warned immediately, or only after officials knew where it would hit?
Explore the Atlantic heat engine, how scientists measure the AMOC, and what a weakening circulation could mean for regional climate.
The same systems learning to cure disease are also learning the machinery of biological design.
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Antimatter propulsion sounds like the future. Antimatter containment failure sounds like the universe deleting the evidence.
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The show made Liu Cixin’s impossible universe easier to watch, but the physics did not survive untouched.
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Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy may be the most ambitious alternate universe ever constructed in hard science fiction.
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The Penning trap began as a vacuum gauge. Now it helps scientists contain antimatter and ask why the universe exists at all.
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CERN scientists are trapping antihydrogen atoms with magnets and lasers to test one of the strangest questions in physics.
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For most of human history, traveling to another star system has belonged to the realm of fantasy.
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What if humanity’s greatest threat wasn’t an asteroid?
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Science fiction used to be dismissed as escapism.
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