Physics

We’re willing to bet you’ve never given much thought to how bugs urinate, but even if you did you probably wouldn’t imagine them using butt-based pinball paddles to flick drops of pee at 40 G’s, using physics never before seen in nature.

Ice and water aren't very exciting to most of us, but they’re super strange from a scientific standpoint. Researchers have now discovered a brand new type of ice that’s described as being a true “snapshot” of water, and may be found on alien worlds.

Scientists have demonstrated a more advanced lightning rod than a humble metal stick. Beaming a high-powered laser into the sky was shown to deflect lightning bolts, enabling laser lightning rods that protect a wider area from dangerous strikes.

The best bits of thunderstorms often happen above the clouds. Scientists have now described in detail the most powerful “gigantic jet” of lightning ever observed, which blasted energy equivalent to 60 regular lightning bolts upwards into space.

If you’ve seen the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope this week, you might have heard the term “gravitational lensing” being thrown around. But what does it mean exactly? And how can it help this new telescope make discoveries?

NASA has released a huge new report that astronomers are calling Hubble’s magnum opus. Analyzing 30 years of data from the famous space telescope, the new study makes the most precise measurement yet of how fast the universe is expanding.

The world’s most powerful X-ray laser is ready for operation after a massive overhaul. The upgraded LCLS-II uses temperatures colder than deep space to accelerate electrons to near light-speed and fire off a million X-ray bursts per second.

Although it should be extremely common in the universe, dark matter has proven tricky to detect. Now researchers have proposed an intriguing new method to spot it – looking for shock waves as dark matter “asteroids” collide with stars.

The universe is governed by two sets of seemingly incompatible laws of physics – classical and quantum physics. MIT physicists have now observed the moment atoms switch from one to the other, as they form intriguing “quantum tornadoes.”

Physicists at CERN have discovered that antimatter falls down. It sounds obvious, but scientists hadn’t yet been able to confirm that it responds to gravity in the same way as regular matter does. A new experiment provides the best answer so far.

CERN physicists have measured the life of the Higgs boson with greater accuracy than ever before. Since the legendary particle only lives for a tiny fraction a second, the scientists came up with a creative workaround to calculate the new figure.

How did the universe end up with exactly the amount of dark matter needed? A new model suggests dark matter particles in the early universe converted regular matter into dark matter exponentially, before being slowed by the expansion of the universe.