This post is the third in a series that accompanies the upcoming publication of my book ‘Gravity’s Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos’ (Scientific American/FSG). In space it’s a good thing that you can’t hear black holes scream. Although some of the most incontrovertible evidence for the existence [...]

The mass of the proton in relation to its much lighter counterpart, the electron, is known to great precision: the proton has 1836.152672 times the mass of the electron. But has it always been so? Quite possibly, according to new research which taps the cosmos as a vast fundamental-physics laboratory. A study of a distant [...]

The search for alien civilizations is returning to its roots. In the latest chapter of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, researchers are using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to check out some of the distant worlds being discovered in droves by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Green Bank is where SETI began in [...]

The hunt for extraterrestrial life just lost one of its best tools. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a field of radio dishes in rural northern California built to seek out transmissions from distant alien civilizations, has been shuttered, at least temporarily, as its operators scramble to find a way to continue to fund it. In [...]