Category: Science Fiction

The sun turns once a month and the Earth once a day, but a white dwarf star 2,000 light-years away spins every 25 seconds, beating the old champ by five seconds. That makes it the fastest-spinning star of any sort ever seen — unless you consider such exotic objects as...

A very large international team of researchers has compiled and performed phylogenetic and phylogeographic analysis on massive amounts of data related to testing people in Africa for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The results are published in Science. The global pandemic has been underway for almost two years, and during that time, many...

When a person breaks a leg, they might get a splint, cast or boot to cradle the bone as it heals. But what happens when a locust breaks a limb? Instead of a cast on the outside, the insect will patch itself up from the inside. These patches can restore...

“Children, I have a special announcement, I need you all to listen very carefully”. Shahina Zaman declared, thumping the white-board-eraser on her desk. Thirty- two pairs of curious little eyes were fixed on Shahina, eager to know what the teacher had to say: “Dear students, over the next one month,...

Time. 10:19 p.m. South Florida. The traffic light rests at red for an eternity, mocking me with its condescending gaze.  I quickly turned my head both directions, not a car in sight for what it seemed to be miles.  Is this some kind of joke?  Looking into the rear view...

These orderly patterns of dark blue dots indicate where individual chlorine atoms are missing from an otherwise regular grid of atoms. Scientists manipulated these vacancies to create a supersmall data storage device. The locations of vacancies encode bits of information in the device, which Sander Otte of Delft University of Technology in...

Any parent trying to hustle a school-bound kid out the door in the morning knows that her child’s skull possesses a strange and powerful form of black magic: It can repel parents’ voices. Important messages like “find your shoes” bounce off the impenetrable fortress and drift unheeded to the floor....

Scientists suspected that the eye-twitchy, dream-packed slumber known as rapid eye movement sleep was important for memory. But REM sleep’s influence on memory has been hard to study, in part because scientists often resorted to waking people or animals up — a stressful experience that might influence memory in different...

The workshop’s bright interior felt like a sauna after the numbing midwinter cold outdoors. The old man immediately took off his fur-lined hat and gloves and started unfastening the buttons of his greatcoat. His workers glanced up from benches and forge upon his entrance, but they took too much pride...

Anya’s earworm was malfunctioning. There could be no other explanation for what she was feeling: she had caught herself several times humming the melody of a tune that wasn’t her graduation song.  Just this morning at breakfast, her fingers had developed an impromptu twitch, tapping out an unfamiliar rhythm on...

Before we met, you showed me your diary. I must confess that I am still confused by this sequence of events, as, I imagine, you must be confused by my decision to leave your life so suddenly. I’ve gone over everything in my head time and time again and I...

Gustavo Bondoni The humans were taking too long. They seemed hell-bent on stopping at each and every burial nook and statuette — no matter how badly overrun with cobwebs — to make a little notation. Location, description, photograph number, everything was placed in the little black book. Emmerson was a...

James Beamon # After two days of space travel, I briefly considered suicide. It seemed the only way to save myself from Kael’s crappy rations. The crappiest kind, the white pouches with token descriptions like “MEAT” and “VEGETABLE” stamped across the front in bold, black letters. “Almost there,” Kael said...

A chemical found in a distant space cloud looks a lot like a building block of life on Earth. The cloud sits about 26,000 light-years away in interstellar space, a term for the gap between stars. Called Sagittarius B2, the cloud contains dust and gas — the stuff that makes...

::Megan Arkenberg:: The scanner bips and gives a four-note ascending scale of disapproval. Item not found. I look at the package in my hand. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but this coffee’s not in our system. It’s from an alternate dimension’s grocery store.” Her lips make a smacking sound like a magnetic...