The Secret Speed of Gravity: Does Gravity Travel at the Speed of Light? On August 17, 2017, a disturbance reached Earth that had been crossing the universe since long before anything capable of noticing it existed. Two neutron stars, orbiting each other in a galaxy called NGC 4993, had spiraled together and merged, sending a ripple through spacetime that LIGO's detectors in Louisiana and Washington picked up after a journey of roughly 130 million years. Exactly 1.74 seconds later, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL observatory recorded a burst of gamma rays arriving from the same patch of sky. Two entirely different kinds of signal, generated by two different physical processes, having traveled for longer than most mammal species have existed arriving within less than two seconds of each other. That gap is the whole story, in miniature, because it's so small relative to the distance traveled that it forces a ques...
Scientists Found a Hard Drive That Survived a Million Years It Wasn't Made of Metal In 2021, a team of researchers sequenced genetic material pulled from the teeth of a woolly mammoth. The animal had been dead for more than a million years. Its body was gone. Its bones had spent an eternity buried in permafrost. And yet, locked inside those frozen molars, the exact chemical instructions for building a mammoth were still legible. Now compare that to the hard drive sitting in your laptop. Give it ten years, maybe less, and it will start to fail. Its data will degrade, its platters will wear out, and eventually it will be landfill. Here is where things get strange. The oldest, most reliable data storage technology on Earth was never built in a factory. It was written by evolution, and it has been quietly outperforming our best engineering for billions of years. It is called DNA, and a growing number of scientists think it might ...