Adam Frank

Ah, I remember it like it was just last spring. The flurry of rumors, the initial shock, the charge of surprise, the shear delight before a major scientific discovery. Yes, I remember it like it was last spring because — it was.

And now it's all dust.

On March 17, ...

So, there's the city and then there's the country, the built environment and the wilderness, nature and civilization. Whatever name the dichotomy goes by, we usually think of the world humans create and the world outside their creations as separate and unequal.

But as we enter the Anthropocene — ...

"Where were you?" my beloved asked as I walked through the door caked in mud and sweat. "I was communing with my gods," I responded — and proceeded to tell her about the exquisite hike I'd had that morning in New York's Letchworth State Park (the Grand Canyon of ...

Jon Morse, former astrophysics division director at NASA, can remember the exact moment he knew things had to change.

It was the late spring of 2011. After one particularly long planning meeting, Morse headed to the elevators with some high-ranking budget officials. As they waited for the next car, Morse ...

The path from ignorance to knowledge, from darkness to light and from purposelessness to puppies goes something like this:

• Around 400 BC, the Greek philosopher Democritus and other "atomists" make the radical proposition that below all the worlds' appearances, all matter is composed of tiny, indivisible particles.
• Around 2,000 ...

Why is next Tuesday different from Amsterdam's Central Station?

Next Tuesday is off in the future. It hasn't happened yet, and you can't say what it's going to look like. Maybe it will be like today. No big deal. But maybe you'll get hit by a falling meteor on Monday ...

Consider this, if you would: a network of far-flung, powerful, high-tech civilizations closely tied by trade and diplomatic embassies; an accelerating threat of climate change and its pressure on food production; a rising wave of displaced populations ready to sweep across and overwhelm developed nations.

Sound familiar?

While that laundry ...

Updated at 10 a.m. ET

Israel said today that it had resumed targeting "terror sites" across the Gaza Strip after renewed rocket attacks on the Jewish state. The resumption of violence casts doubts about the future of indirect talks in Cairo between Israel and the Palestinians to stop the fighting ...

Somewhere back in the late 1980s, when I was in graduate school, I listened to a lot of They Might Be Giants. And a lot means, well, a lot. I may have lost a girlfriend or two over them.

The hyper-clever lyrics, the punchy infectious pop-tune melodies, the accordion — ...

C'mon, admit it. You've wondered. You've mused. You've pondered. At some point in your life — probably after watching a science-fiction movie — you've found yourself asking that all-important question: What happens if you find yourself in space without a spacesuit?

I found myself asking the same question the other ...

The news has been pretty depressing these last few weeks as the world seems to slip into a new kind of chaos every day. With conflicts on multiple continents, including a commercial airliner shot from the sky, it's hard to look at the ways we humans are horrible to each ...

The race has started. It's going to be run fast and hard and it won't be over for a while. It's a race whose winner doesn't matter as long as someone, somewhere makes it to the finish line.

The race I'm talking about is the push to create a new ...

Understanding how things work in the quantum world is both fun and mind-bending. Physicist Adam Frank suggests spending a minute watching this video on the wave-particle duality.

When fantasy has gotten so grim and dark that the term "grimdark" has been coined to describe certain authors, things may have gone slightly overboard. With Traitor's Blade, the first installment of a new fantasy series called the Greatcoat Quartet, author Sebastien de Castell seems to be taking a stand ...

In the United States, the debate between science and religion seems to be powered by a perpetual motion machine. The claims that Neil deGrasse Tyson's inspired Cosmos series was anti-religious stands as the latest salvo in a long battle that generates lots heat but very little light. Having been ...

So, it's that season again: time to grab a book and lounge by the pool or the lake or on the roof of your apartment. Not a big book with equations, not a book with computer code and not a book about economics or political science. No, it's summer and ...

Sure, we have a nice thing going for us here on Earth. The temperature is just right. We have lots of water. The atmosphere is full of tasty oxygen. But even with these appealing characteristics, there is something about our planet that seriously bums me out.

The sky. It's ...

Just in time for the official start of summer, NPR's Adam Frank heads outside to better understand the summer solstice. The secret, he says, is in the sunsets.

The very first time I met Marcelo Gleiser he wanted us to start some trouble. Already established as a leading theoretical physicist, Marcelo wanted us to form a group blog to more fully explore science in its full human context (that blog, of course, became this blog: 13.7 ...

We have a problem. It's a big one that raises big challenges for the human future and the ability of our most cherished political institution — democracy — to guide that future.

First, however, let's begin by acknowledging what we have already done. Over the past 200 years, we've used ...