When flying between two cities, aircraft may not necessarily take the same path. Instead of traveling between New York and Seattle on the same, constant route, each voyage must follow a flight plan that takes it over particular waypoints. While you may believe that the plane’s captain makes the decisions, this is the job of…
The Coxcatlan Cave in Mexico’s Valley of Tehuacan has housed tens of thousands of years of human history through the millennia. Records of the early domestication of maize and the start of agriculture have been preserved in layers of dust, rocks, charcoal, and decaying plants. But under them, all lies something even more surprising: what…
Enceladus was expected to be a frozen planet, a frozen lump of solid ice orbiting Saturn indefinitely. However, between 2004 and 2017, the Cassini spacecraft visited the system and discovered an active moon that was virtually bursting at the seams with water, hydrogen, and methane: three chemicals that would go hand in hand with life…