Science & Technology

Explore an interactive map of over 300,000 Flock devices in the continental US, as of December 2025.

Known for his theories of relativity, Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize in physics was for his discovery of the photoelectric effect, which makes digital cameras possible.

About 10% of the radiation people are exposed to each year comes from outer space, with higher percentages for those living at higher elevations or who fly often.

While special relativity describes motion along a flat underlying fabric of the universe called spacetime, general relativity extends this theory to explain motion through curved spacetime.

Earth's atmosphere regularly loses hydrogen and helium as these elements are accelerated enough by collisions with high-energy particles from the sun to escape Earth's gravity.

Engineers fire dead chickens into the turbines and windshields of airplanes to test whether their designs can withstand potential bird strikes.

A toaster inside a freezer would still toast normally because it generates thermal energy faster than a freezer can extract it from the air inside.

Explore how more than 150 dog breeds are genetically related to one another with this interactive visualization.

In 2024, a survey of Japanese beaches uncovered plasticorals—a material in which melted plastic entered the pores of and mechanically fused to coral skeletons.

Quantum computers leverage the properties of the quantum scale, including superposition and entanglement, to solve specific computational tasks significantly faster than classical computers.

Long strands of sugar molecules in the acidic, digestive fluid of pitcher plants enable the fluid to stretch like chewing gum and trap insects.

In 1880, Jacques and Pierre Curie discovered that electricity could be produced by striking certain materials—the piezoelectric effect—a phenomenon that is seen in barbecue lighters.

Explore interactive simulations of 3D strange attractors—graphs that help visualize chaos and are characterized by a fractal structure.

Astronomers search for life on exoplanets by analyzing their atmospheres for the presence of chemical biosignatures—molecules associated with biological processes.

Biosphere 2 is the largest Earth science experiment ever built, housing multiple biomes to study Earth's systems within a facility larger than three acres.

Artificial superintelligence is the final frontier of artificial intelligence, surpassing human intelligence in every domain and capable of acquiring knowledge and skills without human intervention.

Gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—are detected at LIGO by measuring how two lasers traveling down equally distant, perpendicular tunnels interfere with one another.

Benjamin Franklin was the first person to use the term 'battery' in an electrical sense when describing a series of Leyden jars—static electricity storage containers.

In mathematics, chaos is not the same as randomness because the latter lacks an underlying pattern or causal relationship.

Extremophiles are organisms that thrive in environments that would normally be inhospitable to most living things because they possess specialized biomolecules called extremozymes.

Within the continental US, air traffic flying above 10,000 feet is managed by one of 20 Air Route Traffic Control Centers.

DNA stores genetic information, and proteins serve as the molecular machines powering cellular functions, but because RNA does both, scientists think it predates them both.

In 2003, an electronic voting system in Belgium reported that a political party received more votes than was possible—a glitch attributed to a cosmic ray.

While published images have suggested that Neptune is much bluer than Uranus, the two ice giants are a similarly pale shade of greenish-blue.

Estimated to be between 350 and 400 million years old, Australia's Finke River is considered the oldest river in the world.

Some bent trees can straighten themselves using tension wood, which forms on the upper side of bends and provides a pulling force, resembling muscle function.

The world's first digital camera was invented in 1975 and took 23 seconds to capture a 0.01 megapixel, black-and-white photo.

Although Mars does not feature liquid water on its surface, geological features provide evidence that the Martian surface experienced massive flooding in the distant past.

Tropical cyclones, which include hurricanes and typhoons, consist of three main parts: the eye, the eyewall, and rainbands.

There is no exact size to an atom because electrons are modeled as existing in blurry probability clouds—an inherent property of the quantum scale.

With one species reaching speeds of 58 kilometers (36 miles) per hour, dragonflies are the world's fastest flying insect.

Antimatter stars would appear identical to normal stars and be similarly powered by nuclear fusion, but they would be extremely short-lived in a matter-dominated universe.

Although fluid motion has been modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations for decades, mathematicians have long sought to prove whether the equations always provide realistic solutions.

Similar to how shadows can reveal the shapes of obstacles blocking visible light, computed tomography scanners create 3D internal images by measuring X-ray absorption.

Type your name and see it spelled out in satellite images captured by NASA's Landsat program.

Because rising temperatures cause materials to expand, bridges and other infrastructure are built with gaps called expansion joints to accommodate the resulting lengthening.

Because El Niño and La Niña affect the distribution of warm waters—a key ingredient in hurricane formation—they affect the intensity of the Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons.

Lasers result from electrons in a material's atoms being excited into a higher-energy, metastable state and then dropping back down, producing identical particles of light.

Most of the world's land-based glacial ice and the planet's only two ice sheets are located in Greenland and Antarctica.

Rather than measuring the rising and falling of the sun or pendulum swings, optical clocks track the passage of time using the vibrations of atoms.

Antimatter can be created from dark lightning—high-energy light emitted by deflected electrons after they are accelerated to near the speed of light by thunderstorms.

View high-resolution maps of how El Niño and La Niña affect weather patterns around the world at different times of year.

The colors of auroras change with the intensity of solar activity and with altitude because of differences in atmospheric density and chemical composition.

The first battery was invented to settle a dispute over what caused severed frog legs to twitch when connected to different metals.

Watch a visualization of global ocean currents from NASA's Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean project.

If Earth's water were suddenly replaced with air, forest fires would burn most of the world's vegetation within years.

Data suggests that claims about the golden ratio underlying the geometry seen in nature, from mollusk shells to human proportions, are largely exaggerated.

Explore an interactive visualization of greenhouse gas emissions from 745 million sources worldwide.

The world's first artificial element, technetium, was discovered 68 years after its existence was predicted in order to fill a gap in the periodic table.

Beyond a certain pressure and temperature, matter can become a supercritical fluid—an exotic state of matter that simultaneously exhibits properties of gases and liquids.