Adam Frank

The enormous success of the film The Martian has a lot of people talking about life in space.

What is it really like spending months in small enclosure with a bunch of other astronauts while surrounded by death via a hard vacuum? People being people, it turns out that after ...

It's time to change the way we talk about climate change.

Political leaders have acknowledged human-driven (or "anthropogenic") global warming since 1964 (when President Lyndon Johnson mentioned it in a speech to Congress). Since then, however, we've done almost nothing to address its dangers. As everyone knows, the problem is ...

Monday's extraordinary news that running water exists on Mars is enough to get any wanna-be space explorer's blood pumping.

Oh, to be sailing the high frontier, braving the unknown with nothing but your trusty "bot" by your side. Going where no one has gone before etc., etc.

But when it ...

It was just about a year ago that Pope Francis made headlines by disparaging the view that God is a magician waving a magic wand.

For many, the pope's remarks pointed to a far more subtle perspective on God, science and universe than we, in the U.S., are used to ...

How do our expectations, fears and anxiety about death affect our attitudes about the existence of a deity? Is the hope of immortality the principle reason people believe in God? Is the rejection of an afterlife the principle reason for rejecting the idea of a deity?

These questions came to ...

The auditorium lights were low as the high school students filed in — and I was on the stage with the teachers who led the school's honor society.

My job was to give a short speech to the new inductees whose grades and activities earned them their place in the ...

So, now that we've reached the last week of summer, it's time to review all the great stuff that happened and made a big impact this season.

No, I'm not talking about movies like Mad Max Fury Road — or songs like the ever-annoying "Worth It."

So, yeah, I get it. It's just about the end of summer. For most folks, this means the last chance to get away to the beach or the lake or the woods. Just about any kind of "away" will do.

And with escape on our minds, it may be hard ...

As I write this, California remains deep in its fourth year of drought.

One hundred percent of the state of Nevada is in drought — with 40 percent in the extreme drought category. Over to the southeast, 93 percent of Arizona's territory is in some form of drought. Even ...

Science does a lot of things for us. It creates astonishing technologies transforming our lives for the better. It reveals unseen dimensions of wonder, from the grandeur of spinning galaxies to the marvels of microscopic cells.

But for all that wonder and all those game-changing technologies, sometimes science just turns ...

Here at 13.7, we have have spent considerable time thinking about art and science. In particular, we've often tried to unpack the meaning of their similarities.

We've explored the way abstract sculpture embodies experimental techniques common to both scientists and artists. We've looked at Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson for ...

The New York Times recently carried a fascinating report on how a walk in nature can actually change the wiring in your brain. According to the story, not only did a brief walk in the woods make people report they felt happier but, using brain scans, researchers found time ...

We are in the middle of a mindfulness revolution.

According to Time, The Huffington Post and a host of other media outlets, mindfulness and meditation are having their moment in the spotlight. From hospitals to corporate wellness programs, mindfulness is — supposedly — a new path to relieving ...

We don't make very good judges of distance, not on cosmic scales at least. Using our own wanderings on Earth as the judge of all things, evolution has left us poorly prepared for the epic scales of all things astronomical.

This week, as a box of electronics called New ...

Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt. For billions of years, it has been out there, biding its time, orbiting 250 million miles from the sun.

Now, for the first time, a robot emissary from Earth has made the long dark journey to Ceres, revealing it to be ...

When discussing climate change, students often ask if I am pessimistic about the future. I tell them I am quite the opposite. I am an optimist about what is coming next.

Without doubt, the sustainability bottleneck we face is real and, quite possibly, an existential challenge for civilization. On the ...

Things are about to get really interesting in the long-stalled public discussion on climate change.

This Thursday, Pope Francis and the Vatican are set to release a major statement on climate change (a draft was leaked Monday). In a papal letter to the world's bishops, called an encyclical, Pope ...