Liquid water mixing with rock on this distant moon could create chemistry necessary for life, scientists report.
I favor the simplest possible explanation.
Some say the jet’s disappearance shows the need to modernize tracking technology.
The spare sugar packet: It’s what I got going for me today
Analysis led to the conclusion that the jet went down in the southern Indian Ocean, but finding it is another story.
You call it your head, I call it a bizarre knobby protrusion.
Physics, money and practicality shape technological limits in hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
A new birdlike species of dinosaur had a beak, giant claws, a bony crest and feathers everywhere.
The Internet is teeming with theories of what could have happened aboard the plane. Here are the major ones.
The 35-year-old theory of “cosmic inflation” gets a boost from an experiment at the South Pole.
It’s hard not to lose faith in this investigation
What happened on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is unknown — but investigators think it was no accident.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is the mystery of the year
Bomb? Pilot suicide? Shot down? Catastrophic decompression? How does an airplane vanish into thin air?
Europa probably has an ocean and perhaps extraterrestrial life, but can we afford to visit, or even fly by?
We’re going to Europa! Possibly. (Or maybe going nowhere)
In space, the U.S. and Russia need one another, and geopolitical tensions are far away.
Joel Achenbach writes on science and politics for the Post's national desk. He has been a staff writer for The Washington Post since 1990, started the newsroom’s first online column, "Rough Draft," in 1999, and started washingtonpost.com’s first blog, Achenblog, in 2005.
He has been a regular contributor to National Geographic since 1998, writing on such topics as dinosaurs, particle physics, earthquakes, extraterrestrial life, megafauna extinction and the electrical grid. A 1982 graduate of Princeton University, he has taught journalism at Princeton and Georgetown University.
Achenblog collects Joel's musings on politics, science and culture.
Destination Unknown
An occasional series on the future of NASA and space exploration.
- “A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea,” an account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and its aftermath (2011)
- “The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West” (2004)
- “Captured By Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe” (1999)