If I glance at your passport, I am able to figure out — depending on where you are from — your age, your country of origin, your full name, your social security number, and your gender, among other things, and in order to retrieve these bits of information from your passport, I need first and foremost to be able […]
Category: Astrophysics
Here you will find articles related to astrophysical phenomena within our Universe.
Taking a step back from our day-to-day activities can sometimes have an invigorating effect, as it allows us to pause for a moment, reflect on where we stand, and see where we want to go from there. This article gives a literal spin to this reflective exercise: Where do we actually stand in the broader […]
It goes without saying that it is hard to observe something that we cannot perceive with our own eyes. Luckily, science and technology have come a long way in helping us to detect the unseeable. Think of optical and atomic force microscopes showing how the Shewanella oneidensis bacterium extracts oxygen from toxic metals, mirrors and […]
Sometimes we are gazing at the stars, scintillating reassuringly across the sky, as if we are yearning for a long-forgotten speck of what once felt as home. An enigmatic melancholy, barely noticeable, yet ever so present, falls upon us. Would that nostalgic state of mind not make more sense if we knew that the body […]
Gravity is one of the four fundamental interactions in nature — the three others being electromagnetism, the strong nuclear interactions, and the weak nuclear interactions — and it pervades space like an invisible field until infinity. Albert Einstein taught us that the gravitational field is spacetime itself, and that gravity is experienced as a result of large masses bending […]