Adam Frank

It's remarkable to contemplate how much of science fiction's vision for the future has already come true. But in some ways we have been left out in the cold in terms of the future we expected. The reason for the gap sometimes has more to do with what nature allows, ...

When computers finally become self-aware, will their first act be enslaving the obviously inferior human race? The answer, I think, is "no."

But they won't spare us out of altruism or a sense of responsibility to their creators. No, they will leave us alone because we bore them.

The average ...

Israel's ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer tells Steve Inskeep that the U.S. should have no relations with the new Palestinian government, which includes Hamas.

The river was ice water and the forest so dense that every sightline disappeared into green fog. We had been moving slowly upstream for hours, blind to the jumbled rocks making up the riverbed. A misstep earlier in the day had filled my waders with freezing water. I didn't want ...

We live in a galaxy of 100 billion stars. That's a one-hundred-thousand million suns, joined together by their mutual gravity in the shape of disk, all swirling around a common center.

A 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and how many have you seen in the last ...

It's a fine mess we've gotten ourselves into. Last week the National Climate Assessment report was released detailing the toll climate change is already taking on the United States in terms of droughts, floods, heat waves and changes in agriculture. This report follows on the heals of two others ...

When I was a kid we had Star Trek reruns showing twice a day. These were, without a doubt, the most important hours of my day. One thing that came from watching the Enterprise zoom around the galaxy so much was the recognition that there were a whole lot of ...

We spend a lot of our lives getting from here to there. Everyday we slog from home to work and back again. Once a week we make the trek to the grocery store. A few times a year we take vacations across the state, the country or even across an ...

Have you ever slowly revved up the engine on your car (when it's in neutral) until the whole vehicle begins to shake a little? Press the peddle a little more and the car stops shaking. Ease off the pedal and let the engine slow and then you hit the shaking ...

A couple of weeks ago I played hooky (don't tell anyone). It had been a long day of science and the bureaucratic business of science. After a working through a few grant proposal deadlines and a morning telecom, I threw my hands up, put my laptop down and walked away.

...

If you asked a medieval farmer if he had an hour to spare, he would have asked you, "What's an hour?" If you asked a renaissance shipwright if he had a second to spare, he would have asked you, "What's a second?" If you asked a factory worker at the ...

By now you've probably heard about Neil deGrasse Tyson's reboot of Cosmos, running every Sunday night on FOX (yes, that FOX) for the last few weeks. It was a controversial step to take Carl Sagan's beloved early 1980s-era tour of the universe and revamp it for the modern ...

This scene from Inherit the Wind means more to me than a thousand science fiction films full of bug-eyed monsters with pulsing brains.

I grew up with science fiction movies. I'd watch everything and anything that showed up on TV (this was the 1970s, and there were only six stations). ...

It's not every day that a new window on the birth of the universe is thrown open. It's not every day that human beings get the chance to leap into the void and have their conceptions of space and time stretched to the limits. It's not every day that we ...

We are rarely lost anymore.

In a foreign city or just a drive out of town, our GPS-enabled smartphones pin our positions on digital maps to within a few meters. We are rarely without facts anymore. Any question that has an objective answer — from the last day of the ...

Sometimes the visible world is all we need to be astonished at this weird thing called reality. For example that big, warm, yellow ball makes it into the sky every day. And every year, somehow, Spring makes it back to us. (Hello Spring! Sooner rather than later would be nice.) ...

Our resident physicist, Adam Frank, likes to point out the great science happening around us all the time. Even there in your toilet bowl, that whirl of water is similar to a spiraling galaxy.

So, what is our problem? We fly through the air and complain about the food. We project our thoughts around the globe almost instantaneously and then complain about a one-second lag. We live in age of miracles. We live with machines that can look painlessly inside us if we get ...

Have you ever watched a little kid playing in a sink full of water? It could be the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink or even the tub — it's all the same to kids. The faucet goes on. The faucet goes off. The water fills up, the water drains away. ...