The big story this week was the launch of Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company backed by the likes of James Cameron, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. You can watch the full webcast of the press conference on YouTube. Paul Raeburn at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker has a good round up of the coverage [...]

Cygnus X is a star forming region in the constellation Cygnus in the night sky. It looks rather pretty in visible light, as shown at the beginning of the video below. But in radio, infrared and gamma ray wavelengths, Cygnus X really comes to life. Recent Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) observations have shown that [...]

Quantum entanglement experiments are not something you can buy in the science kit aisle at Toys ’R Us. The cheapest kit I know of is a marvel of miniaturization, but still costs 20,000 euros. In the past month, though, I’ve put together a crude version for just a few hundred dollars. It’s unbelievably simple—so simple [...]

Paris has long had the nickname the "City of Lights," due to its role as a center of education during the Age of Enlightenment and, in the 1800s, due to its early implementation of electric lighting. It very nearly had its name associated with another form of radiation in 1910, however, thanks to a truly [...]

The cosmos is full of surprises—not a week goes by without some group of astronomers announcing a perplexing new discovery that upends theory or expectation. But equally important is the difficult and time-consuming research required to firmly pin down what astronomers think they already know. Take, for instance, a new study on the origins of [...]

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.] 5) Supernova Space Rays Here on Earth, we’re under constant attack from space. Charged particles, primarily protons, crash into our atmosphere at close to the speed of light. We call them cosmic rays and we’ve finally found out where they come from. In order to [...]