Stories by Gayoung Lee

The answer to this supposedly simple particle physics question isn’t so simple

This telescope has revealed the whipped-up dust from the birth of a star—and a shining background galaxy—more clearly than ever before

The Haenyeo, an all-female group of divers on South Korea’s Jeju Island, spend much of their lives underwater without equipment—a “superpower” that may be written into their DNA

The largest, most powerful launch vehicle ever built is meant to be a key part of SpaceX’s plans to send humans to Mars—and NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon, too

By physically engineering their environments, megafauna such as dinosaurs curbed fruit seed sizes—a role that now may be filled by humans

Your orange cat may host a never-before-seen genetic pathway for color pigmentation, according to new studies

A new review of ocean data suggests that more than 99.999 percent of the global deep seafloor has never been seen by humans. But what does that really mean?

Nicknamed the “bone collector,” this newly confirmed caterpillar in Hawaii secretly scrounges off a spider landlord by covering itself with dead insect body parts

The first physical evidence of Roman gladiators fighting animals has been found in skeletal remains from England

Quantinuum’s 56-bit trapped-ion computer has succeeded in demonstrating randomness in quantum circuits to establish secure, private connections

In general, crowds like to form lanes to get across—until too many people go in too many different directions

In just the first 259 days of data collection, KATRIN, a beta-decay-based detector in Germany, has set the smallest upper limit yet on the mass of the neutrino—the universe’s lightest massive particle

The brain’s response to information depends on language’s grammatical structure

Crows can tell the shapes of stars from those of moons and symmetrical quadrilaterals from unsymmetrical ones, new results show

Nicknamed the “Big Wheel,” a giant, spiral-shaped disk galaxy was spotted in an unusually crowded part of the early universe just two billion years after the big bang

Overall, “space miso” tastes just like regular miso—but slight differences in its microbial profile suggest that extraterrestrial conditions affect how microbes grow and flourish

In a first, physicists have directly seen Hofstadter’s butterfly—a long-sought-after fractal in the quantum realm

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams had been “stuck” at the International Space Station since June 6, 2024, after Boeing’s Starliner, the vehicle they rode to get there, ran into multiple hardware problems

Mummies’ aromas may provide insight into historical social classes and periods, according to a team of trained mummy sniffers

Despite some connection delays postlanding, the lunar lander Athena is officially set to study what lies beneath the moon’s surface over the next 10 days

This tiny instrument lets users taste things—without actually eating them—by releasing a combination of chemicals that reconstruct different tastes. But replicating associated smells and textures will take some time

Scientists studying a centuries-old mystery of physics suggest two “arrows of time” control the evolution of quantum systems

Molted penguin feathers record mercury infiltrating Antarctica’s food web

In partnership with NASA, the Intuitive Machines lander Athena will send a water-seeking drill, a pogo-sticking crater probe and other novel technologies to the moon