Apollo 13’s long-shot mission to reach Earth

On this date 50 years ago, the jinxed Apollo 13 mission splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The spacecraft’s lunar module never landed on the moon as intended, but considering everything that went wrong, it was arguably the most successful Apollo mis...

ASMR becomes a brain tingling art form in a new exhibition

Once thought to be a figment of our collective imagination, ASMR (or autonomous sensory meridian response) has taken YouTube by storm. It can be created by sights and sounds ranging from beautiful music to whispering to the clipping of hair, and caus...

AI transforms ‘The Great British Bakeoff’ into a horror show

Artificial intelligence (AI) can do astonishing things when given specific jobs, but it's terrible at understanding context -- something we've seen before in this series. Thanks to a new experiment inspired by The Great British Bakeoff (GBBO), we can...

Tracking down unexpected sources of light pollution

Light pollution is the bane of stargazers, which is why you need to get out of the city to make the best use of your telescope. However, even in the middle of nowhere, your observations might still be disrupted by stray light sources. That prompted a...

Capturing the Sun’s Texas-sized cells in the highest detail ever

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) started with some controversy, but its first images are already changing the field of solar science. The Maui observatory captured the highest-resolution photos of the sun ever taken, revealing detail down...