Imagining the best places to live on Mars

The inhabitability of the Martian environment presents significant colonization risks

Terraforming the thin atmosphere, toxic dust, extreme cold, and lack of magnetic field is infeasible, given limitations to the size of what can be sent to Mars. NASA and SpaceX are instead exploring creating underground shelters.

Besides Earth, Mars is the only possibly habitable planet in our solar system

Sending humans to Mars in the following decades poses significant challenges, from the vast distance covered to get materials there to powering technology during weekslong dust storms. Research is ongoing to develop life support systems that can regenerate or recycle consumables.

Why extremophiles may play an important role in terraforming Mars

Possessing unique biochemicals that can detoxify extreme environments and resilience against the Martian surface that is lethal to humans, scientists are exploring whether colonies of these organisms can transform small areas of the Red Planet into future habitats for humans. Extremophiles may also be best equipped to serve as microscopic factories for the fabrication of essential polymers.

Some 19th century astronomers thought Mars was inhabited

As telescope technology advanced, astronomers became able to observe the surfaces of objects in our solar system with greater detail. The dips, valleys, and lines crisscrossing Mars, particularly, captured onlookers' imagination, leading some to speculate that the seemingly organized features could only have been created by an intelligent civilization.

Explore a world map of Mars

The yellows spots scattered across the map indicate meteor impacts while the red regions represent volcanoes and their associated lava flows. The varying shades of brown indicate cratered highlands and midlands, which make up most of the southern hemisphere.

Everything you need to know about Mars

The Lunar and Planetary Institute provides assorted resources about the red planet, Mars. Review this basic 101 level introduction and get to know our solar system neighbor. Learn about Mars' planet-wide dust storms, staggeringly high mountains (six of which dwarf Mount Everest), and whether there's water there below the surface.

View the surface of Mars from NASA's Perseverance

Simulate a visit to the red planet with the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover. This 3D interactive experience lets you explore various locations on the martian surface. See closeup images the rover has taken and view key points of interest. It's the next best thing to being there and certainly far safer!

Where should we look for extraterrestrial life?

Not all planets are created equal. Those capable of sustaining life as we known it must meet strict criteria, the most important of which is being at the right distance from their host star to have liquid water on the surface.

Depending on environment, aliens' bodies would have wide-ranging possibilities

Humans tend to imagine aliens as humanlike, but that's probably unlikely. From small space spiders to metallic carnivores, life on other planets—and how we could interact with it—is difficult to imagine.

Experts ponder nuclear rockets to send humans to Mars

Nuclear rocket technology might be the fastest, safest way to get to the red planet. But if NASA wants to go, it should start development now.

The best places to visit in 2024

Stargaze from moonscape deserts, or absorb high-design in a rising city. Peruse Conde Nast's annual look forward to travel destinations and dream up your next big trip.

An in-depth look at Venus, our gassy neighbor

Get to know Venus, one of our closest planetary neighbors. Despite being named for the Roman goddess of love—and the only one named for a woman—Venus is an searingly hot place covered in thick carbon dioxide clouds, volcanoes, and warped mountain ranges. Yet it has a lot to teach us about planet Earth.

Ranking the 10 hottest places on Earth

Death Valley in California often gets the press for the hottest recorded air temperature in the world. What about the runners-up? This list compiles the rest of the Earth's hottest spots, from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to Kebili in Tunisia.

Simulating the moon's surface in the desert

And why is the next cohort headed there? The geological conditions in Flagstaff, Arizona, can easily echo those of the moon, making the area a prime spot to train astronauts. This article explains how scientists crafted these training grounds and why astronomers are drawn to the nearly century-old city.

A visual guide to Hollywood dystopias and their real-world locations

Even the most dire dystopias are grounded in the real world. That's especially true with dystopian movies, which turn real cities into near-future nightmares. This guide from Atlas Obscura takes readers on a tour through some of the most recognizable, from "Blade Runner" (filmed in Los Angeles) to "Total Recall" (Mexico City, Mexico), "The Matrix" (Sydney, Australia), and more.

How we know what’s deep inside the Earth, despite never traveling there

We'll likely never see the Earth's core, but we can make educated guesses about what it's like down there. Nearly as hot as the sun's surface and under impossibly high pressure, the inner Earths extreme conditions make it impossible to explore. Yet, seismic waves during earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and light waves from the sun provide fascinating insights about our planet’s mantle, crust, and core.

Sci-fi writer Jeff VanderMeer writes dystopian fiction about the environment

Noted science fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer discusses his 2014 novel "Annihilation," which uses climate change as a dystopian frame. VanderMeer notes that he’s not interested in cynicism, even though that’s how most people view dystopian literature. “I’m not a fan of fiction that’s totally hopeless,” VanderMeer says. “You find ways of documenting the world as it is and you wind up redefining utopia and dystopia.”

The importance of the mesosphere, the coldest part of Earth's atmosphere

Atmospheric gases are dense enough in this region to begin burning up debris traveling toward Earth's surface, producing meteor showers, or shooting stars. Although we normally associate decreasing temperatures with increasing altitude, temperatures increase beyond the mesosphere layer due to the absorption of high-energy ultraviolet radiation and X-rays.

Explore Earth's future climate under different levels of warming

An incredible interactive project showing how global warming is projected to affect the world, from temperatures to rainfall, droughts and flooding, and more.

Hot, semiarid, coastal, cold: An overview of the four desert types

This article describes the various characteristics of deserts, including their geography, their climate, their soil, and the wildlife and vegetation that inhabit them. All desert climates are characterized by extreme temperatures and low rainfall,...

Climate determinism wrongly linked human traits and societal progress to geography

Historically rooted in Greek philosophy, its ideas used the latitudes where people were located to justify racial hierarchies, casting tropical peoples as lazy or inferior. These biases still influence how media and research portray people in climatically disadvantaged regions. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

What its like to live in the world’s ‘smartest cities’

What’s it like to live in a smart city? The BBC interviewed residents of five of the world’s smartest, as determined by the International Institute for Management Development, to find out. (See previous resource for those rankings.) Common praises included ease of transportation, sustainability initiatives and proximity to nature.

City structures cause localized heat zones hotter than nearby rural areas

Urban materials like asphalt and concrete trap heat, while cities lack cooling features like trees and water. Due to hot runoff, urban streams can heat up by as much as 18°F more than forested streams.

The 'Goldilocks zone' is the region around a star where liquid water can exist

Also referred to as the habitable zone, this region varies based on the properties of a planetary system's host star, including its size and luminosity, which measure the rate at which the star radiates energy per unit area.

Listen to a podcast that explains why Elon Musk is creating a 'company town' in Texas

Elon Musk is recreating an old tradition of large corporations creating "company towns" where their workers can live. In his case, the town, which he is calling "Snailbrook," is being created for SpaceX and some of his other companies in Bastrop, Texas, a small community roughly 45 minutes outside of Austin.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

The boiling temperature of water decreases with increasing elevation because the molecules need less energy to overcome the lower atmospheric pressure associated with thinner air.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Planeterrellas create artificial auroras that mimic the atmospheric displays of light by setting up an electric field between two metal balls in a jar filled with a small amount of air.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

Explore the animals that populate the depths of the ocean, from fish and coral in the first few hundred feet, all the way down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

Scientists testing how climate change affects plants found, in a years-long simulation study, that poison ivy grew 70% faster with the resulting extra carbon dioxide.

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that was home to an estimated population of 200,000 to 400,000.

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

See photos of Meteora, a mountainous site in central Greece, home to 14th-century monasteries perched atop soaring outcroppings.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

After 25 people used virtual reality headsets to practice flying with virtual wings—flapping their arms—their visual cortex responded to the wings almost as if they were real arms, treating them as body parts.

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.

Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' is infamous for having some of the highest industrial pollution, toxic air emissions, and cancer risks in the US.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Studies suggest when you sleep is as important as how much you get, and syncing with your circadian rhythms may lead to less fatigue and improved long-term health outcomes