STEM Challenges

Life on Earth thrives in boiling acid, frozen tundra, the deep ocean floor, and even the vacuum of space. These extreme survivors expand our idea of w...

If life exists on a distant world, it might leave chemical fingerprints in the planet's atmosphere detectable from light-years away. Exploring how to ...

Liquid water on a planet's surface is our best proxy for life — but being in the right zone around a star is just the beginning. Venus shows that bein...

Exoplanets are impossibly faint and close to blinding stars hundreds of light-years away. Yet astronomers have developed five brilliantly clever metho...

For most of human history, we could only wonder whether other stars had planets. In the last three decades, telescopes have revealed thousands of worl...

How will the universe end? Scientists have mapped out several possible futures depending on the nature of dark energy. From the Big Freeze to the Big ...