2012

Earth’s sister is out there, somewhere, and scientists searching for planets that may support life believe they are closing in on finding just that. “Maybe this year, maybe next — before 2014,” predicted Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, head of...

Cheap, functional, reliable things unleash the creativity of people who then build stuff that you could not imagine. There’s no way of predicting the internet based on the first transistor. — George Whitesides Simplicity: we know it when we see it - but...

The central feature in Sarah Stewart’s Harvard lab is a bright blue blast tank in which she and two undergrad assistants simulate some of the biggest booms in the cosmos: the collision of celestial objects. Attached to the blast tank is a 40-millimeter...

Now that astronomers routinely find far-flung planets orbiting other stars, a fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is pushing into a new frontier in detecting bodies outside our solar system: distant moons. “It’s the next big...