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Artemis II was designed as a test flight, but Nadia Drake frames it as something larger: the moment human spaceflight returned to the moon after more than half a century. The mission did not land. Instead, commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian mission specialist Jeremy Hansen rode NASA’s Orion spacecraft on a looping 10-day path around the moon, proving out the systems that are supposed to support later lunar landings and, eventually, a sustained human presence near the lunar south pole.

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The hard question after the race to build one

This article starts from a useful shift in perspective. The field has spent decades asking whether quantum computers can be built at all. Now that companies and laboratories can assemble machines with hundreds or thousands of qubits, the sharper question is what those machines will actually be good for.

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Why quantum computing is at an inflection point

This article asks a deliberately hard question: are quantum computers about to become a world-changing technology, or are they still a fragile research program surrounded by too much hype? The answer is neither simple optimism nor dismissal. Quantum computing is real, the article argues, and it has already moved from blackboard theory into working machines built by companies such as Rigetti, IBM and Google. But the machines that exist now are still far from the large, reliable systems needed to solve useful problems better than ordinary computers.

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Shapes Beyond Their Outlines

Rachel Crowell’s article turns a survey of mathematicians’ favorite shapes into a tour of how modern mathematics thinks. The premise sounds almost playful: ask specialists to name beautiful or intriguing forms and explain why they matter. But the answers quickly show that, for mathematicians, a shape is rarely just an outline. It can be a way to classify spaces, encode choices, study motion, compare dimensions, or translate a hard problem into a more workable language.

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Seeing Mines with Particles from Space

Adam Bluestein’s article turns a mining story into a physics story. The pressure begins with copper and other critical minerals, whose demand is rising as grids, electric vehicles, batteries and other clean-energy systems scale up. Existing mines are being asked to produce more, even as their ore gets poorer and new discoveries take many years to become working operations. The result is a basic problem of vision: mining companies need to know much more about what is underground before they dig, blast or send workers into unstable spaces.

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A Provocation from Inside Physics

Lee Billings’s interview with Gerard ’t Hooft turns a deceptively simple complaint into a broad argument about the future of fundamental physics. ’t Hooft is not an outsider taking shots at quantum mechanics. He is a Nobel-winning theorist whose work helped make the Standard Model mathematically coherent and who later proposed the holographic principle, one of the ideas that shaped modern quantum-gravity research. That background makes his impatience with quantum mystery harder to dismiss.

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A moon that grows only in the mind

Phil Plait opens with a familiar astronomical surprise: a full moon climbing over the horizon can look enormous, almost near enough to touch. The effect is powerful even for someone who knows the moon has not swollen in the sky. That is the point of the column. The moon illusion is not a subtle measurement error or a trick caused by a rare viewing condition. It is a durable mismatch between what the eye receives and what the brain decides it means.

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Gravity’s roundness test

Phil Plait starts with a question that sounds like a bar bet for astronomers: what is the roundest object anyone has found in the universe? The trick is to define roundness carefully. The article is not looking for the smoothest surface. It is looking for the object closest to a sphere, with every point on its surface nearly the same distance from its center.

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Darkness that makes stars

Phil Plait’s column begins by turning away from the spectacular images that usually define modern astronomy. The universe is full of exploding stars, colliding galaxies and glowing nebulae, but some of its most important objects are visible because they are dark. The article focuses on Bok globules: small, dense clouds of gas and dust that can look like holes punched into a starry background.

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A forecast for the sun’s temper

Solar flares are not just spectacular eruptions on a distant star. When they are aimed the wrong way, they can disturb the technological systems that modern life keeps in orbit and on the ground. A flare releases intense radiation from the sun’s surface, and it can be followed by a coronal mass ejection, a giant bubble of magnetized plasma. If that material reaches Earth, it can trigger geomagnetic storms that threaten satellites, communications, navigation systems, power grids and astronauts.