(Credit: SpeedKingz/Shutterstock) The first time someone synthesized saccharin, the artificial sweetener in Sweet’N Low, it was an accident. A scientist studying coal tar in 1879 didn’t wash his hands before eating dinner and was surprised to taste a sweet residue from the lab on his fingertips. Same goes for the invention of the sweetener sodium cyclamate in 1937: the unwitting pioneer, who was working on a fever medication, put his cigarette down on the lab bench, and when he pi ...read more

Colorized elevation map of a lakebed in New Jersey shows stripes of ancient sediment deposits. The deposits are tied to cycles of wet and dry climates throughout Earth’s history. (Credit: LIDAR image, US Geological Survey; digital colorization by Paul Olsen) Ribbons of blue — the modern Raritan and Neshanic rivers — slice across a landscape that’s key to understanding Earth’s deep-time climate cycles. This colorized elevation map captures a 40-square-mile chunk o ...read more

Overall, the global mean temperature during March through May was 1.02 °C warmer than the 1951-1980 average. This made it the second warmest such period in records dating back to 1880. (Source: NASA GISS) March through May — spring in the Northern Hemisphere — was the second warmest such period in records dating back to 1880, according to a new analysis out today from NASA. On its own, the month of May was third warmest. The map above shows how temperatures around the ...read more

These clouds snapped by the Curiosity rover on Mars are much lower and thicker than the meteor-generated clouds the study looked at. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Justin Cowart) No matter what planet you’re on, physics remains the same. For clouds, that means they follow a peculiar law – they form only around a seed of some sort, usually a fleck of dust or salt. On Earth, with its thick atmosphere and strong air currents, it’s possible to find these lightweight particles through ...read more

Moonrise over the Wasatch Mountains. NASA. This summer is really the summer of the Moon. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, many people are thinking about our past and future relationship with our celestial partner. It is the only object in space whose surface can be seen with the naked eye (without going blind ... sorry Sun), yet only two dozen people have even been there. As we look back at our first visit five decades ago, it's worth taking a moment to consider ...read more

A short history of the universe since the time of the Big Bang. We can directly observe more than 13 billion years of change, but the beginning itself is an enduring mystery. (Credit: ESA) The Big Bang is the defining narrative of modern cosmology: a bold declaration that our universe had a beginning and has a finite age, just like the humans who live within it. That finite age, in turn, is defined by the evidence that universe is expanding (again, and unfortunately, many of us are familiar ...read more

A mockup of the Apollo Guidance Computer that navigated Apollo's way to the Moon. MIT Library. Driving, say, to a friend’s house, we usually have directions to follow like “turn left at the light then it’s the third door on the right.” The same isn’t true when going to the Moon; there are no signposts guiding the way. So how exactly did Apollo astronauts know where they were going when they went to the Moon? This one is tough. You can’t just lau ...read more

An artist's depiction of space junk. (Credit: ESA) SpaceX’s ambitious Starlink project could eventually launch more than 10,000 satellites into orbit and rewrite the future of the internet. But Elon Musk’s company has been taking heat from the astronomical community after an initial launch in late May released the first 60 satellites. The 500 pound (227 kg) satellites were clearly visible in Earth’s night sky, inspiring concern that they could increase light pollution, ...read more

Temple 1 at the ancient Maya city of Tikal in Guatemala. (Credit: Rob Crandall/Shutterstock) Two trophy skulls, recently discovered by archaeologists in the jungles of Belize, may help shed light on the little-understood collapse of the once powerful Classic Maya civilization. The defleshed and painted human skulls, meant to be worn around the neck as pendants, were buried with a warrior over a thousand years ago at Pacbitun, a Maya city. They likely represent gruesome symbols of military ...read more

Astronomers think the galaxy NGC1313 may be home to an intermediate-mass black hole. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA) (Inside Science) -- If you have a computer and a few spare moments, you can help search the cosmos for an elusive breed of black hole that astronomers once thought didn't exist. Black holes come in two main types: stellar-mass black holes, which generally have about 10-24 times the mass of our sun, and the much heavier variant known as supermassive black holes, which c ...read more