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

Quarks and leptons are the smallest known subatomic particles. Does the Standard Model allow for an even smaller layer of matter to exist?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

It could one day fuel nuclear fusion reactors.

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.

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

You might think it’s impossible to run out of wind, but Europe’s “wind drought” proves otherwise. And it’s only going to get worse.

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

Ever since the Big Bang, cataclysmic events have released enormous amounts of energy. Here’s the greatest one ever witnessed.

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

Despite the Sun’s high core temperatures, particles can’t quite overcome their mutual electric repulsion. Good thing for quantum physics!

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

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.

Realizing that matter and energy are quantized is important, but quantum particles aren’t the full story; quantum fields are needed, too.

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?

Dark matter hasn’t been directly detected, but some form of invisible matter is clearly gravitating. Could the graviton hold the answer?

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 constants, like the speed of light, exist with no underlying explanation. How many “fundamental constants” does our Universe require?

The farther away they get, the smaller distant galaxies look. But only up to a point, and beyond that, they appear larger again. Here’s how.

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