Welcome to Pleistocene Park
In Arctic Siberia, Russian scientists are trying to stave off catastrophic climate change—by resurrecting an Ice Age biome complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths.
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Jon Juarez What Happens If China Makes First Contact?
As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.
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Spencer Platt / Getty Nature's Disastrous ‘Whitewashing’ Editorial
Science's ethos of self-correction should apply to how it thinks about its own history, too.
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Olga Dar / ostill / Shutterstock / Zak ... The Eclipse as Dark Omen
America’s skies are set to dim at a strange hour of its history.
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NASA A Wondrous New Image of Planet Earth
The Cassini spacecraft gives us a rare glimpse of ourselves from between Saturn's rings.
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Bobby Yip / Reuters Elon Musk Is Betting Big on Donald Trump
He may come to regret it.
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Paramount Pictures Is Arrival the Best ‘First Contact’ Film Ever Made?
Two Atlantic writers on the very high highs, and (perhaps) the very low lows, of the genre
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NASA The Prospect of a New Dark Age
How President-elect Trump could affect our ability to understand our changing planet
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An Animated Guide to Humanity's First Interstellar Mission
Innovations in space exploration are making galactic travel increasingly tangible.
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NASA How to Jump-Start Life Elsewhere in Our Galaxy
A new paper on “Genesis missions” explains how interstellar probes could accelerate evolution on distant planets.
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Ross Andersen Alien Worlds Might Be Covered in Enormous Mountains
On the sublime scenery that might await us on exoplanets.
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European Space Agency / Hubble / NASA Want to Find Intelligent Life on Other Planets? Look for Refrigerators
Could Freon in the atmosphere of a distant planet be the thing that finally confirms humankind is not alone?
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NASA Fancy Math Can’t Make Aliens Real
An astrophysicist says extraterrestrial civilizations “almost certainly” existed at one time or another. Here’s what’s wrong with his argument.
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Richard Hammar Inside a Billionaire’s New Interstellar Mission
Yuri Milner is spending $100 million on a probe that could travel to Alpha Centauri within a generation—and he's recruited Mark Zuckerberg and Stephen Hawking to help. In an interview with The Atlantic, Milner makes his case for star travel.
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NASA Through Hardship to the Stars
Bob Ebeling, the engineer who foresaw the Challenger disaster, and lived with guilt for decades, has died.
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ESA The World's Most Urgent Science Project
To know the Earth’s future, you must first know its past.
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Jim Young / Reuters When Science Offers No Escape
What went unsaid in last night’s debate.
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The Most Powerful Space Telescope Ever
A behind-the-scenes look at the NASA telescope that will search for signs of life on distant planets
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Kara Gordon / The Atlantic Snowed in at NASA, Keeping Watch Over a Space Colossus
Time is running out on the agency’s most ambitious science mission in generations, and that means no stopping for anything—not even a historic blizzard.
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Caltech The Meaning of Planet Nine
Astronomers think they may have found a “super earth” lurking in the outer solar system.
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NASA A Major Correction
We recently published an article naming Jupiter “the best planet.” As everyone knows, Saturn is the best planet. We regret the error.
