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There’s an extra source of massive “stuff” in our Universe beyond what gravitation and normal matter can explain. Could light be the answer?

It’s one of Einstein’s most bizarre predictions. And it’s true. There’s no such thing as absolute time. No matter where you are, how fast you’re moving, or how strong the gravitational […]

Why I was prepared to hate The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but ended up loving it.

With three colors and three anticolors, there aren’t actually nine gluons; only eight. One of the most puzzling features of the Universe is the strong nuclear force. Inside every proton or […]

A new study proposes that Hawking radiation could be used to find dark matter in places like primordial black holes.

Quantum physics just keeps getting weirder, even as it gets more fascinating. “Is it a wave or is it a particle?” Never has such a simple question had such a […]

Nuclear fusion has long been seen as the future of energy. As the NIF now passes the breakeven point, how close are we to our ultimate goal?

There are so many problems, all across planet Earth, that harm and threaten humanity. Why invest in researching the Universe?

No matter how accurately you place two Plinko chips, you cannot count on the same outcome twice. Of all the pricing games on the iconic television show The Price Is Right, […]

Even in the most exotic scenario imaginable, they still can’t remain stable in the Earth’s interior. It’s well known among scientists that if you submit even the most nonsensical paper […]

How does philosophy try to balance having free will with living in a deterministic universe?

The more horror we consume, the harder it becomes to find a good scare. These genuinely unsettling movies should get you in the mood for Halloween.

Researchers find a way to distort laser light to survive a trip through disordered obstacles.

If the multiverse is real, where does all the energy for it come from? One of the biggest scientific puzzles, even given our knowledge of the Big Bang, is to understand […]

Information may not seem like something physical, yet it has become a central concern for physicists. A wonderful new book explores the importance of the “dataome” for the physical, biological, and human worlds.

The neutrino is the most ghostly, rarely-interacting particle in all the Standard Model. How well can we truly make “beams” out of them?

75 years after Erwin Schrödinger’s prescient description of something like DNA, we still don’t know the “laws of life.”

Even physicists sometimes fall for these. For centuries, the laws of physics seemed completely deterministic. If you knew where every particle was, how fast it was moving, and what the forces […]

Controversial physics theory says reality around us behaves like a computer neural network.

As the first Friedmann equation celebrates its 99th anniversary, it remains the one equation to describe our entire universe.

If dark energy gets stronger with time, our fate could be an utter catastrophe. When it comes to the entire Universe, one of the biggest existential questions we’re capable of […]

We only detected our very first gravitational wave in 2015. Over the next two decades, we’ll have thousands more.

If you think you know how an astronomical nova works, buckle up. You’re in for a ride like you never expected.

Three of our dimensions are spatial and one is temporal, but could there be more? From any point in space, you are free to move in any direction you choose. No […]

In our Universe, a left hand reflected in a mirror or pond appears to be a right hand. While most of the laws of nature are symmetric under reflections, obeying […]

To find the optimal route between many different locations, we need the power of quantum computers.

Is the Universe the same everywhere? Or are there truly ‘special places’ around? For practically all of human history, one assumption about our place in the Universe had long gone unchallenged: […]

Even with only 12.5 hours of exposure time, James Webb’s first deep-field image taught us lessons we’ve never realized before.

As we gain new knowledge, our scientific picture of how the Universe works must evolve. This is a feature of the Big Bang, not a bug.

You can lead an overconfident chatbot to expert knowledge, but can it actually learn and assimilate new information?