MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Despite keeping us grounded and warping light that travels through space, gravity is actually quite a weak force. The smaller the mass, the less gravity appears to have any pull, until at quantum scales it appears to have no force at all.
If you asked an astrophysicist what is yet to be discovered in the universe, there’s a good chance they’d paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: It’s full of known unknowns.
The Einstein Probe, an X-ray telescope managed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, will be ready to launch next month. The probe will look for transient events in X-ray light and try to answer some fundamental questions about black holes and gravitational waves.
A one way trip to the Red Planet would take up to nine months. During that time, astronauts on board the Mars-bound spacecraft could lose their sense of direction and ability to know up from down, making it difficult to orient themselves on the Martian surface. In order to keep astronauts on course, a wearable device…
“I went silent,” Dwayne Fernandes told me. “I shut the hell up.” Fernandes, a double-amputee since the age of 11, was recounting his experience in weightlessness, having recently participated in a parabolic flight alongside a disabled research crew. The zero-g flight threw him into a deeply contemplative state, and as…