A nuclear winter is a theoretical concept, but if the climate scenario expected to follow a large-scale nuclear war, in which smoke and soot from firestorms block sunlight, came to fruition, global ...

For a long time, the end of the Ice Age felt like a slow fading rather than a sharp break. Mammoths vanished. Old ways of ...

In this special issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE, experts reflect on 2011 and highlight what to look out for in 2012 in the areas of nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, ...

Scientists have detected the most distant supernova ever seen, exploding when the universe was less than a billion years old. The event was first signaled by a gamma-ray burst and later confirmed ...

Scientists have revealed for the first time a jaw-dropping early view of an exploding supernova. Observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) have revealed ...

Scientists are uncovering new clues that a cosmic explosion may have rocked Earth at the end of the last ice age. At major Clovis-era sites, researchers found shocked quartz—evidence of intense heat ...

Astronomers have released a rare time-lapse video showing the violent expansion of a dead star over two decades. The footage ...