NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, transits the Sun during launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Aug. 30, 2026. Roman is named after the agency’s first chief astronomer. Roman will survey billions of stars and galaxies with a field of view far larger than Hubble’s,
Beauty pass of Roman, coming around from behind with high-gain antenna rotating. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab Roman is making its three-month journey from Earth to Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, or L2. Along the way, Roman is undergoing a process called commissioning, where systems are turned on, adjusted, calibrated, and prepared for
Every week, it seems, a fresh opinion poll leads to shocking headlines: never have people been more afraid of the future, believed that their children won’t be as well off as them, or thought that their country is going in the wrong direction. Feelings of gloom about what lies ahead are particularly rife in the
Artificial-intelligence models can be used for tasks ranging from coding to taking meeting notes, depending on a laboratory’s requirements. Credit: da-kuk/Getty As artificial intelligence pervades scientific research, journals, institutions and classrooms are all adopting their own rules on how to use large language models. But how can individual laboratories decide on the best ways to
Time’s Second Arrow: Evolution, Order, and a New Law of Nature Robert M. Hazen and Michael L. Wong W. W. Norton (2026) Like evolution by natural selection, some ideas that start out as revolutionary can become so intuitive that they seem banal to future generations. Mineralogist Robert Hazen and planetary scientist Michael Wong must hope
A negative leap second could mean computer systems no longer run like clockwork. Credit: Florian Gaertner/Photothek/Getty The leap second could be scrapped as soon as October. The periodic adjustment to the world’s clocks, which has been done every few years since 1972, was already set to end by 2035. But authorities are considering an immediate