Cosmic

GPS doesn’t work as well inside buildings, underground or underwater. Now engineers in Japan have developed and tested an alternative technology that uses cosmic rays to track movement beneath a building with precision of a few meters.

If you could zoom way out to look at the universe at its largest scale, you’d see that it’s made up of a colossal cosmic web. Now, astronomers have detected shockwaves moving through this web, providing new insights into large-scale magnetic fields.

The movements of the Sun, Moon and stars have long been used to keep track of time, and now engineers from the University of Tokyo have proposed a new way to use the cosmos to precisely track time, using showers of particles from cosmic rays.

Progress on quantum computers may soon stall. Cosmic rays streaming to Earth can interfere with the integrity of information in quantum computers, and now an MIT team has shown just how vulnerable they are and what it might take to protect them.

Headlines lately have been screaming about how scientists in Antarctica have discovered evidence of a parallel universe where time runs backwards. While we seriously wish that was true, a new study has put forward a more realistic explanation.

A big challenge humanity faces in venturing off Earth and into deep space is how to tackle the dangers of cosmic radiation.​ A team has now discovered a drug treatment that could not only prevent cognitive deficits caused by this radiation, but actually repair damage in the brain after exposure.

​Cosmic rays are raining down over Earth every day, but you’d never know unless you had the right tools. Those tools mostly take the form of bulky, expensive lab equipment, but thanks to an MIT team, you can now build your own detector for US$100 – small enough to take on a plane or the subway.​

There are plenty of strange phenomena in the universe, and fast radio bursts are among the more mysterious. So far, we don't know the source of these high-energy light bursts, but Harvard researchers propose they're caused by planet-sized alien transmitters for powering interstellar spacecraft.

​Next time your smartphone freezes, the culprit might actually be the cosmic rays that are constantly raining down on us from outer space. A new study has examined how modern consumer electronics are becoming more vulnerable to cosmic interference, and suggests ways to build better chips.

Scientists at UCI say that cosmic radiation could cause astronauts on long deep space missions to develop "space brain" with symptoms of dementia. Tests indicate that exposure to high-energy particles cause marked by long-term neurological damage.

An international team of scientists has accurately measured how much of the light striking, or tanning your body comes from outside of our galaxy.

Photographer Navid Baraty has turned pancakes into planets, a potato into an asteroid and cat fur into a nebula in his latest series. Have a look at this cosmic fakery and see if you can guess what the images are comprised of – before you read the captions. ​​​