Ryan F. Mandelbaum's posts

“Don’t try to understand it,” a scientist tells the protagonist of Tenet, as she briefly explains the physics of…

The most famous name in American ornithology is that of a slave owner, grave robber, and fraud who invented birds…

A mysterious signal has appeared in an extremely sensitive dark matter-hunting experiment. And after more than a…

White supremacy is baked into science and academia, from racist language in textbooks to a culture that excludes…

Nearly 14 billion years ago, a universe appeared in an unthinkably high-energy blast. Particles started to…

A few years ago, I stopped being afraid of birds and realized that, actually, I really liked them. It just clicked…

When studying penguins, there’s a surprise you’ve gotta watch out for: the laughing gas produced by their poop.

Scientists at U.S. National Laboratories are still testing nuclear weapons among the mountains, desert, and…

Like many people, I live in an apartment. I don’t really know how old my building is, but it must be kind of old: it…

A new study has found that nuclear radiation during Cold War-era weapons testing could have induced significant…

A large, out-of-control piece of space debris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean yesterday, passing over much of the…

It’s not often that a paper attempts to take down an entire field. Yet, this past January, that’s precisely what…

Satellite images have captured the result of a lake of lava collapsing on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, revealing an…

You wake up, slightly intoxicated as tap water rinses over your body. You don’t remember why you’re here, but you’re…

This week, the New York Times introduced many of us to the “murder hornet,” more accurately known as the Asian…

This black hole—if that’s really what it is—is so close to Earth that you can see its star system without a…

Single-celled organisms like Escherichia coli and yeast can grow and survive in an atmosphere like the kind…

When I first saw an image of the Asian giant hornet, now famously referred to as the “Murder Hornet,” my first…

Astronomers and physicists continue to pursue the answers to the universe’s deepest questions, but on many matters,…

Despite the stereotype of a lone, wild-haired Einstein working tirelessly at a chalkboard, today’s biggest…