Stories by Jason Drakeford

A Stanford researcher is growing crystals on the International Space Station and electronics to withstand the extreme environments of Venus.

A pediatric oncologist is racing against time to send scores of sick children out of Ukraine for medical aid.

An astronomy festival in Italy opted to make all of its events and workshops multisensory. They wanted to see whether sound, touch and smell can, like sight, transmit the wonders of the cosmos.

In 2014, a blind astronomer “sonified” the universe’s most explosive event: a gamma-ray burst. By listening to, rather than looking at, the data, she made a critical discovery and changed the field of astronomy.

Space is famously silent, but astronomers and musicians are increasingly turning astronomical data into sound as a way to make discoveries and inspire people who are blind or visually impaired.

Some of the most violent cosmic collisions occur silently in the vacuum of space, but with the right instrumental ears, we can still hear it happen. Here’s how.

By using one of the most complicated and powerful machines on the planet, scientists have found a way to glimpse back to the very beginning of time itself.

For a long time, no one knew how “heavy metals” formed—or showed up on Earth. Now some new evidence finally points the way to an answer.

Black holes, wormholes, entanglement, Einstein, mysterious islands and new science that sees how the inside of a black hole is secretly on the outside.

Decades of work, $10 billion in spending and nearly 14 billion years of cosmic history have brought us to this moment: the first science from the largest and most powerful observatory ever built.

It took hundreds of researchers and many telescopes to capture an image of the black hole at the middle of our Milky Way.