Physicists from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have observed three J/ψ particles emerging from a single collision between two protons. A proton-proton collision event with six muons (red lines) produced in the decays of three J/ψ particles. Image credit: CMS / CERN. The …

The moon is a big deal again. NASA is currently working toward a return to the lunar surface with the Artemis program and the (heavily delayed) Space Launch System rocket. Recently, the Australian Space Agency announced it would cooperate with NASA to send a rover to the moon in 2026, …

Juno launched on August 5, 2011 and successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016. During each of the spacecraft’s 37 passes of Jupiter to date, a specialized suite of instruments has peered below its turbulent cloud deck. The new results from the Juno mission highlight the inner workings of …

Ornithologists have discovered a new genus and species of tanager on the lower slopes of the Andes in southeastern Peru and western Bolivia. The Inti tanager (Heliothraupis oneilli). Image credit: Louisiana State University / Lane et al., doi: 10.1093/ornithology/ukab059. Tanagers are a large family, Thraupidae, of more than 370 songbird …

Perseverance and Ingenuity landed on Mars almost exactly nine months ago. Over that time, both vehicles have already expanded our understanding of Mars, which will only increase over time as both vehicles will continue to conduct further experiments in the months and years to come. Perseverance is a rover based …

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is built for extremes. It’s the fastest spacecraft they’ve ever built, and it orbits closer to the sun than any other artificial object. As it spirals inward for ever-closer views of our local star, it also encounters specs of space dust. Traveling at such incredible speeds …

Getting into space is hard, and one of the reasons is that it takes a lot of energy to break free of Earth’s gravity. So far, the only way we’ve found to do that reliably is with rockets, but a startup called SpinLaunch has something else in mind. Using a …

Ingenuity’s mission on Mars has been a resounding success, but it is not without its emergent challenges; reports have returned from the space copter’s latest exploits, and things are getting tough out there. This fall, we experienced solar conjunction with Mars, where the two planets line up on exactly opposite …

Virtual reality (VR) is a new, immersive medium with under-tapped potential. Though most commonly thought of in the context of personal entertainment, the rising applications of virtual reality stretch across industries that include automotives, education, aerospace and defense, and healthcare. The global VR industry has been estimated at US$18 billion …

For more than a year, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented a societal challenge: It affects us all, but it affects us differently. Like other societal challenges, such as the climate crisis, economic inequality, and racial injustice, it magnifies old and new social problems and brutally exposes weaknesses in our systems. …