January 31, 2018 --Rocket fire streaked across the dark evening sky over Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Jan. The United States had just launched a satellite into orbit, piercing the barrier between our world and the rest of the universe. The oblong Explorer 1 satellite wasn't the first human-made object in space. The Soviet Union's Sputnik claimed that title on Oct. 4, 1957. But the first successful launch of an American satellite made space exploration an international endeavor, paving the way for scientific discoveries of cosmic proportions.

January 23, 2018 --As we push into the final frontier, we are leaving our mark. We have already left more than 400,000 pounds of human-made material on the moon. Rovers and bits of defunct orbiters litter the surface of Mars. And scientists have sent robotic spacecraft hurtling out past Pluto with no final destination. In our own cosmic backyard, space trash abounds.

January 5, 2018 --The idea that there might be gigantic alien structures orbiting a distant star just bit the dust. After citizen astronomers spotted data in 2015 revealing that KIC 8462852, a star about 1,000 light years away, was dimming and brightening in a strange way, one of many explanations proposed by astronomers involved some sort of "megastructures" orbiting the star – perhaps built by aliens to harvest stellar energy. That imaginative suggestion rocketed the star to fame. But Louisiana State University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian and colleagues collected more data on the star, nicknamed "Tabby's Star" for Dr. Boyajian, and they found that the star's strange flickering was thanks to something much more mundane: ordinary dust. We see it in many different ways, and the data that we took showed a clear signature of this being what we would see from dust," Boyajian says. This may be a disappointing outcome for those hoping for proof of an alien civilization. But Tabby's Star's rise to stardom highlights a deeply entrenched human psychological quirk: When presented with a puzzling phenomenon, our knee-jerk instinct is to ask not what created it, but who. Scientists say that as social animals, we are evolutionarily predisposed to see agency and intentionality in the world around us. And when it comes to astronomical mysteries, aliens seem to fit. "It's the duct tape of science," says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI Institute. Because we don't know what aliens might do, they could explain anything. But why do we do that? "It's not just aliens," says Christopher French, a psychologist and founder of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. "We do have a natural tendency to assume that anything odd, or, superficially at least, inexplicable, that there must be some sort of intentionality behind it, some sort of intelligence, there must be a purpose, somebody or something has done that for a particular purpose.

September 29, 2017 Adelaide/Sydney, Australia--To cut costs, Elon Musk's SpaceX company has shrunk the size of the rocket ship it is developing to go to Mars, aiming to start construction on the first spaceship in the first half of next year, Mr. Musk said on Friday. SpaceX plans its first trip to the red planet in 2022, carrying only cargo, to be followed by a manned mission in 2024, Musk, who serves as chief executive and lead designer of Space Exploration Technologies, said at a conference in Adelaide. NASA's first human mission to Mars is expected about a decade later. Musk had previously planned to use a suite of space vehicles to support the colonization of Mars, beginning with an unmanned capsule called Red Dragon in 2018, but he said SpaceX is now focused on a single, slimmer and shorter rocket instead. "We want to make our current vehicles redundant," he said.

August 2, 2017 --C-3PO's fluency in more than 6 million forms of communication in "Star Wars" set a high bar for human-robot interaction, and the field has been struggling to catch up ever since. They started in the factories, taking over physically demanding and repetitive tasks. Now robots are moving into hospitals, shopping malls, even the International Space Station, and experts don't expect their expansion into human spaces to slow down anytime soon. "Even 10 years ago, the primary use of the robots was in the dangerous, dirty, and dull work," says Julie Shah, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. "You'd deploy them to operate remotely from people, but [now] robots are integrating into all aspects of our lives relatively quickly."

July 14, 2017 --According to Norse mythology, the god Odin has two ravens that fly all over Midgard to gather information. Their names are Huginn and Muninn, the Old Norse words for "thought" and "memory." The ancient storytellers who bestowed these names on the birds were onto something: A new study finds that ravens can flexibly plan for events outside their present sensory awareness, a cognitive skill once considered exclusive to humans and other great apes. This research does more than just reveal that the raven is smarter than we thought, that apes' intellectual abilities are less unique than we thought, and that a mammalian lineage is a not a prerequisite for complex thinking. It also adds to the growing body of evidence that intelligence has evolved more than once.

He works in a garage, not in a lab or university, yet the Australian mechanic discovered a star system hiding in data from NASA's Kepler space telescope. Mr. Grey is one of millions of citizen scientists helping researchers to expand collective understanding. Ordinary people of all ages and backgrounds have been contributing to science for centuries on a small scale, but advances in technology have brought a higher level of democratization to science. "This is a collaborative endeavor that anyone could get involved in," says Chris Lintott, an Oxford University astrophysicist and cofounder of Zooniverse, a platform that hosts dozens of citizen science projects. Citizen scientists can contribute to breakthroughs in almost any field, from ecology to astrophysics.

June 1, 2017 --If all had gone according to plan, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would be celebrating its 10th anniversary of capturing stunning portraits of distant galaxies, NASA would be hard at work on its dark energy detector, Virgin Galactic would be running two daily tourist flights to the edge of space for just $50,000 a head, and a Russian company would be doing brisk business with its orbiting luxury space hotel. Of course, that's not how it worked out in reality. Last month, Virgin Galactic made its tenth annual prediction that "next year" it will finally shuttle tourists to space, joining the JWST on the horizon of 2018, and the inaugural mission of NASA's new Space Launch System slipped to 2019. As for that space hotel, don't ask. Planning for the future is part of what it means to be human, but cognitive biases, development challenges, and financing conventions conspire to make accurate predictions next to impossible.

May 4, 2017 --Imagine: At the push of a button a team of machines jumps into action, taking a digital blueprint and transforming an empty lot into one with a physical home in just days. They finish on time, on budget, and with zero waste. This Jetsons-like vision of an automated future has come largely true for car manufacturing. Now engineers hope buildings will be next. From Apis Cor's 3-D printed house to the MIT Media Lab's new multipurpose robotic arm, startups and research teams alike aim to spark a digital revolution in an analog industry that has thus far proved resistant to disruption.

April 24, 2017 --Three years out of a PhD in physics in 1953, John Kelly Jr. published a breakthrough paper about insider information in horse racing in an unlikely place: the Bell Labs Technical Journal. By the time it was in print, the paper's title had been scrubbed of its references to gambling – the AT&T executives didn't care for Bell Labs to be so directly associated with horse racing – but the content remained. Dr. Kelly had not just cracked the mathematics underlying a type of gambling, but he had also revealed deeper patterns about the nature of prediction. When the odds posted by the track are different from the odds determined using insider information, Kelly's formula explains how to take those differences and place the best bets possible, mathematically speaking. The formula is powerful in its simplicity.