Theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg said, "not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think." That could very well be true, but that doesn't mean some very smart men and women will stop seeking answers as to how the Universe behaves. Here is where we try to make sense of their discoveries.
Freezing is one of the simplest methods of preserving food, biological tissue and other perishables, but the formation of ice crystals can damage cells. Now, researchers have developed a new way to “supercool” water in a liquid form well below the usual freezing point.
Continue Reading
Particle accelerators have plenty to teach us, but these facilities involve kilometers of tunnels and equipment. Now, researchers at Imperial College London have developed a new way to accelerate antimatter particles using common equipment already found in many labs, in a much smaller space.
Continue Reading
The ISS is slated to become the coldest spot in space as NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory begins producing ultra-cold atoms that are cooled to 10 millionth of one Kelvin above absolute zero as part of microgravity experiments to study quantum mechanics and the fundamental nature of matter.
Continue Reading
Discoveries that back up Einstein’s theory of general relativity are still being made. The latest comes from the Max Planck Institute, where astronomers have watched how the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way pulls and stretches the light from a star as it makes its closest pass.
Continue Reading
The fastest-spinning manmade object has been created in a lab at Purdue University. This microscopic rotor is made up of two silica nanoparticles stuck together to form a "dumbbell," and by hitting it with laser light the team has sent it spinning at a blistering 60 billion rpm.
Continue Reading
The theory of relativity predicts that any two objects in a vacuum will fall at the same rate. Whether or not this applied to massive objects like planets and stars has long been debated, but now astronomers have shown that the phenomenon does hold true, meaning Einstein was right yet again.
Continue Reading
Ordinary (or baryonic) matter is relatively rare in the universe, and there seems to be a huge chunk of it missing. After 20 years of scouring the sky, astronomers using the ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory have now found clues to this missing matter hiding in intergalactic gas.
Continue Reading
After eight years of banging subatomic particles together, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is getting a major upgrade that, when it goes online in 2026, will increase the collision rates of the LHC by up to a factor of seven and allow around 10 times more data to be collected.
Continue Reading
In a quantum network, information is passed instantly between nodes that have been entangled, and are unhackable since any unauthorized observation of the data will scramble it. Delft scientists have now overcome a hurdle to that technology, by generating quantum links faster than they deteriorate.
Continue Reading
It’s no easy feat to find dark matter, since it's invisible and barely interacts with regular matter. Now the results are in from one of the most comprehensive dark matter experiments ever run, and while the stuff was again a no-show, the study helps scientists zero in on where it might be hiding.
Continue Reading
See the stories that matter in your inbox every morning