It was the most difficult landing ever attempted by a spacecraft on Mars. While it was also the most advanced rover to date, the room of scientists and reporters were nonetheless tense as Perseverance entered the Martian atmosphere. I joined them via the livestream, my sister and I holding hands as we watched the screen. It began its descent. The parachutes deployed, the heat shield abandoned, the rover headed towards the dust-licked spiny outline of Jezero crater. Video taken by a camera aboard the descent stage captured the rover’s landing. …

What if I told you there was a material that could become the world’s most powerful rocket propellant, releasing 20 times more specific energy than is released by the engines of the Space Shuttle? Or that this same material could become the first ever room-temperature superconductor — an advancement that would allow for computers thousands of times more powerful than the ones in your home. An advancement that could help us finally achieve the futuristic dream of nuclear energy. Not only that, it would also make our current energy plants safer and more efficient, as well as transforming the fields…

Silicon chips are the blood and brain of electrical devices. While far from the spongy, viscous texture of our blood cells, they are life-giving all the same. Smartphones, data centers, supercomputers and military jets all rely on these semiconducting chips to send important electrical signals. Within computers they make up the central processing unit, or the machine equivalent to a hardworking mind. So what happens when there’s a shortage of these chips — an event sometimes referred to in the more harrowing sense as a famine — such as the one we’re experiencing now?

Ford and Fiat have put a…

I am haunted by a story. It’s a story only a handful of paragraphs long, written by a man in the 50’s regarding a superintelligent cybernetics machine. In its sparse half a page length the story introduces us to a powerful computer — an accumulation of billions and billions of smaller computers finally connected at the moment a man named Dwar Ev throws a switch. It is mankind’s first interaction with this new cyber-entity. After a moment a question is presented to the machine: “Is there a God?” With no hesitation whatsoever, with no sound of clicking or static or…

What makes a person want to believe in God? Is it the many delicate, impressionable years of their youth spent at the crowded Sunday Mass? Is it the comfort derived from the words of a holy book within which is promised a paradise just beyond this taxing life? Or is it an experience in their life which changes them forever, an overwhelming moment of connection with a higher being and the universe around them? The answer is different for each person. Spirituality is a complex human phenomenon. It was sewn within our kind as far back as thousands of years…

How strange it is to think that some part of us exists online. Who we are no longer has a purely physical answer. Our work, thoughts, relationships, and obsessions exist online, extensions of ourselves that make it possible for people to get to know us without ever having to occupy the same rooms as us. Or even the same country. This is the transition of the human to the cyborg — we are starting to shift more and more of our lives onto our machines.

Encrypting our messages, then, is about more than just protecting our money. It’s about protecting…

The speed of light is an assumption, not a certainty. It’s an assumption in that we have never experimentally measured the one-way speed of light. The best we have been able to do, even with our most sophisticated modern technology, is measure the roundtrip speed of light and assume that the speed is the same in both directions. This is what’s known as being isotropic — a value is uniform no matter the direction. To be anisotropic, then, means that a value varies depending on the direction. Einstein’s theory of special relativity assumes that the one-way speed of light is…

Cold fusion is a subject that’s as extraordinary as it is taboo. Despite a history full of fraudulent researchers and unaccepted experimental evidence, some scientists maintain the idea close to their hearts. And it’s easy to see why. The world of fusion energy is suffused with allure— it would introduce a revolution across the face of our planet. Its creators would no doubt become influential members of modern society with their names forever affixed as important figures in the advancement of mankind.

Yet as we recently explored in my last article, it seems impossible that anything like cold fusion could…