Space
The Burj Khalifa stands 2,717 feet. Just over half a mile. It took about six years, 110,000 tonnes of concrete and an enormous amount of engineering effort to stop it from swaying its occupants into nausea. Put the same structure on the Moon and almost every problem that
Space
The headline went everywhere: human DNA detected in a 2-billion-year-old meteorite. It is not true. No DNA, let alone human DNA, was detected in a meteorite — what was actually found were simple compounds that scientists have known are common in meteorites for decades. Fact-checkers flagged the
Space
Picture a rock ten kilometres across — Chicxulub-sized, the dinosaur killer — coming to a complete stop twenty kilometres above Kansas. It doesn't fall. It just sits there. Everyone's first reaction is relief. Nothing hit us. That reaction lasts about ninety minutes. It has already blocked out
Space
A NASA telescope locks onto a world 500 light-years away. Same size as Earth, same oceans, same continents. Then the spectrometers pick up combustion products, and the radio arrays pick up nothing at all — and someone realises why. The coastlines match a map. Not roughly. Exactly. You are not
Space
It's 2:14 a.m. over Kansas. The Moon is a bright three-quarter disc in a clear sky. Then it isn't. No flash, no debris, no sound. The sky simply closes over the space where it was. Because of where the Earth is turned at
Space
Picture two black holes spiralling into each other. Your brain supplies the explosion automatically — a flash, a shockwave, something enormous lighting up the dark. There is nothing. No flash. No glow. Not a single photon. And yet for a fraction of a second, that silent collision is the most powerful
Space
You'd Die Long Before You Hit Light Speed — And Empty Space Is What Kills You Everyone asks this question wrong, including me the first time. "What if you travelled at the speed of light?" sounds like it should have an answer — some strange but describable experience,