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Matt Strassler’s journey into fundamental physics culminates in a brilliant explanation of the Higgs field. Enjoy this exclusive interview.

In logic, ‘reductio ad absurdum’ shows how flawed arguments fall apart. Our absurd Universe, however, often defies our intuitive reasoning.

Up until 2002, we thought that the heaviest stable element was bismuth: #83 on the periodic table. That’s absolutely no longer the case.

If our Universe were born a little differently, there wouldn’t have been any planets, stars, galaxies, or chemically interesting reactions.

For 550 million years, neutral atoms blocked the light made in stars from traveling freely through the Universe. Here’s how it then changed.

Psychotherapist Israa Nasir explains how a “value-aligned life” can help us crush our goals — without being crushed by the need to accomplish more.

The most common element in the Universe, vital for forming new stars, is hydrogen. But there’s a finite amount of it; what if we run out?

From inside our Solar System, zodiacal light prevents us from seeing true darkness. From billions of miles away, New Horizons finally can.

If you’re a massless particle, you must always move at light speed. If you have mass, you must go slower. So why aren’t any neutrinos slow?

Just 460 light-years away, the closest newborn protostars are forming in the Taurus molecular cloud. Here are JWST’s astonishing insights.

If we waited long enough, would even protons themselves decay? The far future stability of the Universe depends on it.

The Lyman-α emission line has never been seen earlier than 550 million years after the Big Bang. So why does JADES-GS-z13-1-LA have one?

On the largest of cosmic scales, the Universe is expanding. But it isn’t all-or-nothing everywhere, as “collapse” is also part of the story.

James Suzman lived with a tribe of hunter-gatherers to witness how an ancient culture survives one of the most brutal climates on Earth. His learnings may surprise you.

Some solar cells are so lightweight they can sit on a soap bubble.

The Universe is precisely dated at 13.8 billion years old, but astronomers claim the Methuselah star is 14.5 billion years old. What gives?

The Universe’s history, from cosmic inflation to the Big Bang to the present, is known. But whether it’s infinite or not is still a mystery.

Simple physics makes hauling vast ice chunks thousands of miles fiendishly difficult — but not impossible.

If you said “with the Big Bang,” congratulations: that was our best answer as of ~1979. Here’s what we’ve learned in all the time since.

AI projects reveal both heroes and villains in your workforce — success depends on maximizing the number of heroes.

Decades of Alzheimer’s research might have missed a cellular culprit hiding in plain sight.

From the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang (and even before) to our dark energy-dominated present, how and when did the Universe grow up?

Environmental progress is happening quickly but we must keep pushing for change.

Once water gets more than about 200 feet deep, building on the sea floor is out of the question.

On a cosmic scale, our existence seems insignificant and inconsequential. But from another perspective, humans are completely remarkable.

In just a few seconds, a gamma-ray burst blasts out the same amount of energy that the Sun will radiate throughout its entire life.

With new W-boson, top quark, and Higgs boson measurements, the LHC contradicts earlier Fermilab results. The Standard Model still holds.

DESI has allowed astronomers to create an unprecedented 3D map of the Universe representing 20% of the entire sky.

Once the initial blaze of heat dissipated, the constituent particles of atoms were free to bind.

Its implications go well beyond the Earth itself, affecting even the future of space travel.