Just 7,800 light-years from Earth, two dead stars have been discovered orbiting each other at record-breaking speeds. So close is their orbit, that astronomers expect to detect gravitational waves from this pair in a matter of years, when we turn o

Research on robotic prostheses is coming along in leaps and bounds, but one hurdle is proving quite tricky to overcome: a sense of touch. Among other things, this sense helps us control our grip strength - which is vitally important when it comes t

If this headline looks familiar to you, that's because we wrote an almost identical one in 2016. Except back then, we were freaking out because we'd used a year's worth of Earth's resources by August 8. Now, three years later, we've accomplish

The Planetary Society has been busy recently. On June 25, its LightSail 2 launched into orbit; just last week on July 24, the craft opened its sails successfully, a key stage of its mission to demonstrate solar sailing in practice.

Back in 1976, the late Carl Sagan sat down on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to talk about a new form of space propulsion called solar sailing. Four decades later, and The Planetary Society has officially demonstrated this "tremendously exciti

If a person's liver starts failing, the only medical option we currently have is to replace this vital organ, either partially or fully. But now, the discovery of a new type of liver cell has scientists hoping for a less invasive and risky&nbs

Researchers have developed artificial cells that can respond to external chemical forces, just like real ones do. This exciting step could get us closer to using synthetic biological structures in real-world situations, such as targeted drug delive

Black holes can get pretty big, but there's a special class that is the biggest of the big, absolute yawning monster black holes. And astronomers seem to have identified an absolute specimen, clocking in at 40 billion times the mass of the Sun.

With Jupiter currently gracing the northern sky at night, it's a great time to be pointing a telescope at our Solar System's colossus. But one astrophotographer got the sight of a lifetime - what appears to be the flash of an impact, as something e

The 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler was one of the first to muse about the structure of snowflakes. Why are they so symmetrical? How does one side know how long the opposite side has grown?

It's time to celebrate another first in the field of quantum physics: scientists have been able to 'teleport' a qutrit, or a piece of quantum information based on three states, opening up a whole host of new possibilities for quantum computing and

Astrobiologists have sent 18 different strains of bacteria up to the International Space Station.

The Universe is vast beyond imagination, containing billions upon billions of galaxies. We have a pretty good handle on a lot of galactic dynamics, but how these colossal objects form, grow, and change is still something we're struggling to underst

One of the biggest mysteries out there in the Universe is inching closer to answers. An astonishing eight new repeating radio signals known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been detected flaring from deep space.

The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is relatively quiet. It's not an active nucleus, spewing light and heat into the space around it; most of the time, the black hole's activity is low key, with minimal fluctu