英語で読む日経サイエンス

The toaster-sized capsule hit our atmosphere at 12 kilometers per second, enduring temperatures of 3,000 degrees Celsius during its fiery descent before deploying a parachute to slow its velocity. It … 続きを読む →

In 541 C.E., after years of campaigning against Goths and Vandals, Emperor Justinian I had built the eastern Roman Empire into a vast dominion, nearly encircling the Mediterranean Sea. That year, howe … 続きを読む →

Humankind caught its first glimpse of a black hole on April 10, 2019. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team, which uses an Earth-spanning network of radio observatories acting in concert, shared imag … 続きを読む →

Late in the evening of October 24, 2017, an e-mail arrived containing tantalizing news of the heavens. Astronomer Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was writing to one of us (Jewi … 続きを読む →

I have spent much of my career studying ways to blunt the effects of disinformation and help the public make sense of the complexities of politics and science. When my colleagues and I probed the rela … 続きを読む →

In every bit of nothing, there is something. If you zoom in on empty space and take out all the planets and stars and galaxies, you might expect a pure vacuum, but you’d be wrong. Instead you would … 続きを読む →

It dawned on Eian Kantor on a Saturday in early April as he brewed a cup of tea from fresh mint leaves: he had lost his sense of smell. The tea suspiciously smelled of nothing at all. Kantor proceeded … 続きを読む →

If you were dropped into virtually any region of North America 56 million years ago, you probably would not recognize where you had landed. Back then, at the dawn of the Eocene epoch, the earth was wa … 続きを読む →

We may well remember the 21st century in two halves: The time before SARS-CoV-2 and the time after. Despite decades of warnings about the potential for a deadly global pandemic, public health systems … 続きを読む →

In the flat farmland outside Decatur, Ill., a dump truck filled with ears of corn rolls into a warehouse at one end of an ethanol plant run by commodities giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Company. The cor … 続きを読む →

From his sniper’s perch on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, a lone gunman fired 1,000 bullets from high-powered rifles into a crowd of concertgoers in 2017, murdering 58 innoce … 続きを読む →

In 1859, 14 years after the founding of this magazine, Charles Darwin published the most important scientific book ever written. On the Origin of Species revolutionized society’s understand … 続きを読む →

It is a truism among scientists that our enterprise benefits humanity because of the technological breakthroughs that follow in discovery’s wake. And it is a truism among historians that the relatio … 続きを読む →

Five digits radiating from a palm, an arrangement both flexible and strong—capable of playing a piano, wielding a hammer, offering a comforting touch. The hand is our most familiar body part, centra … 続きを読む →

Hundreds of years ago explorers sailed across oceans and traversed uncharted continents to map Earth, and in the past half a century space probes have photographed most of our solar system. Yet as wel … 続きを読む →