An incendiary form of lightning may surge under climate change
A form of lightning with a knack for sparking wildfires may surge under climate change. An analysis of satellite data suggests “hot lightning” — strikes…
A form of lightning with a knack for sparking wildfires may surge under climate change. An analysis of satellite data suggests “hot lightning” — strikes…
Even though it’s only even odds that 2022 will turn out to be less of a disaster than 2021 (or 2020), at least 2022 is…
If you hate having your bubble burst, you’ll love these “everlasting” bubbles. While soap bubbles are known for their fragile constitutions, the new bubbles can…
Some quantum particles gotta get right back to where they started from. Physicists have confirmed a theoretically predicted phenomenon called the quantum boomerang effect. An…
Trapped within a bead of water, thousands of tiny worms wiggle in hypnotic synchrony as they stream around the globule’s rim. And at the center…
Scientists are like prospectors, excavating the natural world seeking gems of knowledge about physical reality. And in the century just past, scientists have dug deep…
It’s confirmed: Protons and antiprotons are well-matched. The two types of subatomic particles mirror each other in the ratios of their electric charge to mass,…
The only known duo of pulsars has just revealed a one-of-a-kind heap of cosmic insights. For over 16 years, scientists have been observing the pair…
An elusive form of matter called a quantum spin liquid isn’t a liquid, and it doesn’t spin — but it sure is quantum. Predicted nearly…
A cloud of ultracold atoms is like a motel with a neon “no vacancy” sign. If a guest at the motel wants to switch rooms,…
It all happens in a snap. New high-speed video exposes the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it physics behind snapping your fingers. The footage reveals the extreme speed at which…
Inscribed on an Italian family’s 15th century coat of arms and decorating an ancient Japanese shrine, the Borromean rings are symbolically potent. Remove one ring…
From the maw of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, two enormous jets stream thousands of light-years into space. Scientists…
The cosmic origins of elements heavier than iron are mysterious. One elemental birthplace came to light in 2017 when two neutron-rich dead stars collided and…
A mad scramble to observe the moments after a star’s death is helping scientists understand how the star lived out its last year. Astronomers reported…
For decades, physicists have suspected an interloper. A reclusive, hypothetical subatomic particle might be creeping into studies of neutrinos, nearly massless particles with no electric…
There’s physics to having your ducklings in a row. By paddling in an orderly line behind their mother, baby ducks can take a ride on…
A millimeter might not seem like much. But even a distance that small can alter the flow of time. According to Einstein’s theory of gravity,…
Mistakes happen — especially in quantum computers. The fragile quantum bits, or qubits, that make up the machines are notoriously error-prone, but now scientists have…
You’ve heard of disappearing ink. Now get ready for suddenly appearing ink. Using a clear liquid, researchers can print a full rainbow of colors on…
Like helicoptering maple seeds, tiny new fliers whirl gracefully as they glide. The miniature aircraft, which can be made as small as a grain of…
A crucial number that rules the universe goes big in a strange quantum material. The fine-structure constant is about 10 times its normal value in…
Like soft serve ice cream, beams of atoms and molecules now come with a swirl. Scientists already knew how to dish up spiraling beams of…
Protons can surf some truly gnarly waves. A new experiment suggests that the subatomic particles can be accelerated by a process akin to surfers catching…
Flashes of CreationPaul HalpernBasic Books, $30 The Big Bang wasn’t always a sure bet. For several decades in the 20th century, researchers wrestled with interpreting…
The W particle may have been found — Science News, August 21, 1971 Physicists distinguish four different kinds of force by which objects in the…
With a powerful laser zap, scientists have blasted toward a milestone for nuclear fusion. A fusion experiment at the world’s biggest laser facility released 1.3…
At every moment, subatomic particles stream in unfathomable numbers through your body. Each second, about 100 billion neutrinos from the sun pass through your thumbnail,…
A new crew of potential ripples in spacetime has just debuted — emphasis on the word “potential.” By loosening the criteria for what qualifies as…
Like a shaggy dog in springtime, some black holes have to shed. New computer simulations reveal how black holes might discard their magnetic fields. Unlike…
Mythology has its titans. So do the movies. And so does physics. Just one fewer now. Steven Weinberg died July 23, at the age of…
Try to bend an icicle and it’ll snap in two. With its tendency to crack into shards, ice’s reputation for being stiff and brittle seems…
A smattering of plutonium atoms embedded in Earth’s crust are helping to resolve the origins of nature’s heaviest elements. Scientists had long suspected that elements…
This pasta is no limp noodle. When imprinted with carefully designed arrangements of grooves, flat pasta morphs as it cooks, forming tubes, spirals and other…
In an instant, the bomb obliterated everything. The tower it sat on and the copper wires strung around it: vaporized. The desert sand below: melted.…
The cosmos keeps outdoing itself. Extremely energetic light from space is an unexplained wonder of astrophysics, and now scientists have spotted this light, called gamma…
Sprinkles of helium rain may fall on Jupiter. At pressures and temperatures present within the gas giant, the hydrogen and helium that make up the…
The Large Hadron Collider’s claim to fame is its ability to unveil elusive subatomic particles. But there’s one class of particle that it had never…
Nuclear clocks could be the GOAT: Greatest of all timepieces. If physicists can build them, nuclear clocks would be a brand-new type of clock, one…
If you could peer into a particle physicist’s daydream, you might spy a vision of a giant lunar particle accelerator. Now, researchers have calculated what…
The Manhattan Project brought together the finest scientific minds in the United States for one urgent purpose: to build an atomic bomb. That included people…
Quantum mechanics usually applies to very small objects: atoms, electrons and the like. But physicists have now brought the equivalent of a 10-kilogram object to…
Scientists could be a step closer to understanding how some birds might exploit quantum physics to navigate. Researchers suspect that some songbirds use a “quantum…
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