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It will be immensely difficult for the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains to protect their competitive edge if they do not pursue a radical change.

From the Big Bang to black holes, singularities are hard to avoid. The math definitely predicts them, but are they truly, physically real?

From the Big Bang to dark energy, knowledge of the cosmos has sped up in the past century — but big questions linger.

Although early Earth was a molten hellscape, once it cooled, life arose almost immediately. That original chain of life remains unbroken.

From unexplained tracks in a balloon-borne experiment to cosmic rays on Earth, the unstable muon was particle physics’ biggest surprise.

To Fred Hoyle, the Big Bang was nothing more than a creationist myth. 75 years later, it’s cemented as the beginning of our Universe.

The Universe is 13.8 billion years old, going back to the hot Big Bang. But was that truly the beginning, and is that truly its age?

We can reasonably say that we understand the history of the Universe within one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. That’s not good enough.

When the Universe was first born, the ingredients necessary for life were nowhere to be found. Only our “lucky stars” enabled our existence.

Atomic nuclei form in minutes. Atoms form in hundreds of thousands of years. But the “dark ages” rule thereafter, until stars finally form.

If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?

In many ways, we are still novices playing with toy models seeking to understand the stars. 

For decades, theorists have been cooking up “theories of everything” to explain our Universe. Are all of them completely off-track?

By probing the Universe on atomic scales and smaller, we can reveal the entirety of the Standard Model, and with it, the quantum Universe.

If it weren’t for the intricate rules of quantum physics, we wouldn’t have formed neutral atoms “only” ~380,000 years after the Big Bang.

When you combine the Uncertainty Principle with Einstein’s famous equation, you get a mind-blowing result: Particles can come from nothing.

Glueballs are an unusual, unconfirmed Standard Model prediction, suggesting bound states of gluons alone exist. We just found our first one.

All matter particles can act as waves, and massless light waves show particle-like behavior. Can gravitational waves also be particle-like?

Long thought a pipe dream, scientists have discovered a drug that mimics the effects of exercise.

Across the subterranean United States, not all rocks were created equally.

We don’t know what causes Miyake events, but these great surges of energy can help us understand the past — while posing a threat to our future.

In 1974, Hawking showed that black holes aren’t stable, but emit radiation and decay. Nearly 50 years later, it isn’t just for black holes.

Quantum physics is starting to show up in unexpected places. Indeed, it is at work in animals, plants, and our own bodies. 

No matter how good our measurement devices get, certain quantum properties always possess an inherent uncertainty. Can we figure out why?

Since its observation discovery in the 1990s, dark energy has been one of science’s biggest mysteries. Could black holes be the cause?

The concept of the warp drive is currently at odds with everything we know to be true about physics.

Our classical intuition is no good in a quantum Universe. To make sense of it, we need to learn, and apply, an entirely novel set of rules.

In theory, dark matter is cold, collisionless, and only interacts via gravity. What we see in ultra-diffuse galaxies indicates otherwise.

Einstein’s relativity overthrew the notion of absolute space and time, replacing them with a spacetime fabric. But is spacetime truly real?

Here on Earth, the Sun is our primary source of light, heat, and energy. But it also poses a grave threat to human civilization.