Six decades ago, US President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would put human beings on the Moon by the end of the decade. But it wasn’t until 2016 that Margaret H. Hamilton (b. 1936), a computer scientist and software innovator, was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work on […]

Interested in helping astronomers search outer space? It’s possible with a program called Einstein@Home, which allows your computer, when it’s idle, to help scientists search the skies for pulsars and other neutron stars. The idea behind the program, called distributed computing, is straightforward: downloaded software connects your home computer with thousands of others throughout the […]