Physics & Chemistry

It’s Time to Plan for How Quantum Computing Could Go Wrong, Say Entrepreneurs and Physicists

Quantum computers that can crack our strongest encryption methods might be decades away—but a group of entrepreneurs and researchers think we better start talking ethics now. Perhaps one of the year’s biggest stories was our collective realization that our data isn’t nearly as secure as we thought—and that tech companies aren’t acting in our best…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Physicists Create Incredible ‘Quark Soup’ Droplets That Expand Like Little Big Bangs

The universe began with a bang—and things immediately got weird. Stars and galaxies didn’t form right away. Scientists think that matter was initially a near-perfect fluid of quarks, the smallest known component of atoms. They have found evidence of these fluids in high-energy particle collider experiments. Now, evidence continues to mount that these liquids can…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Why the Large Hadron Collider Is Shutting Down for Two Years

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest atom smasher, will be turned off for the next two years for upgrades. Hopefully, its particle-hunting abilities will be even better once it restarts in 2021. The LHC experiment is the crown jewel of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. A complex of successive rings accelerate subatomic particles before injecting…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Where Is Dark Matter? Another Experiment Fails to Find a Signal

A dark matter experiment in South Korea may soon confirm or deny an outstanding piece of dark matter evidence. Observations of the universe reveal that it consists mostly of stuff scientists don’t understand. Regular matter seems to make up less than 5 percent of the universe, dark energy around 68 percent, and the rest is…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Physicists Spot Four Black Hole Collisions, Including the Largest One Ever Recorded

Physicists have spotted four new instances of black holes colliding and sending their gravitational waves toward the Earth, including the most massive collision recorded to date. We now know that black holes collide with some regularity throughout the universe. Individual collisions are no longer huge news stories—instead, astronomy has entered an era of in which…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Scientists Build Atomic Clocks Accurate Enough to Measure Changes in Spacetime Itself

Physicists have created atomic clocks so precise that they can measure deformations in spacetime itself, according to new research. We don’t all experience time passing equally—time passes more slowly closer to something massive’s gravitational pull, as famously theorized by Albert Einstein. And since gravity is typically interpreted as the way mass warps space itself, that…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Expanding Universe Mystery Deepens

An important discrepancy in measurements of the universe’s acceleration has theorists wondering whether we’ve gotten something fundamentally wrong in our understanding of the history of the universe. One currently unexplained cosmological mystery is the “Hubble tension,” where various measurements of the universe’s expansion seem to disagree. As the story surrounding this tension gets murkier, others…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Meet Dawn Shaughnessy, the Real-Life Alchemist Who Expanded the Periodic Table

The periodic table is chemistry’s holy text. Not only does it list all of the tools at chemists’ disposal, but its mere shape—where these elements fall into specific rows and columns—has made profound predictions about new elements and their properties that later came true. But few chemists on Earth have a closer relationship with the…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Plans Revealed for Enormous Particle Collider in China

Scientists this week released a conceptual design report for a next-generation particle accelerator in China, which would serve as a “Higgs boson factory,” as its proponents have called it. Back in 2012, the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson particle, which netted François Englert and Peter Higgs the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. A…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

So What’s Going on With That ‘Hurricane of Dark Matter?’

It’s the perfect science-fiction device: a hurricane of dark matter. Recent, real-life research has demonstrated that our Sun is currently engulfed in a so-called a stellar stream. Some publications have seized on this ominous-sounding idea, reporting that Earth is about to be walloped by a dark matter storm—but in fact, if it exists, we’re already inside…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Scientists Weighed the Earth Using Ghostly Particles From Space

Scientists have to use some roundabout methods to weigh the Earth and measure what’s inside it—typically, they’ve used sound waves and the strength of gravity to make their calculations. But one team has weighed the Earth in a whole new way: by measuring mysterious cosmic particles that pass through it. A team of Spanish researchers…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Astronomers Propose Huge New Telescope System to Understand the Most Energetic Particles Ever Detected

Astronomers have proposed a truly enormous telescope consisting of 200,000 radio receivers around the world, which added together would cover an area the size of Nebraska. They hope to spot incredibly energetic but difficult to detect neutrinos coming from distant astrophysical sources. The Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection, or GRAND, would hunt for these…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Scientists Worldwide Are Getting Serious About Quantum Internet

It takes little more than logging on to see the flaws in today’s internet—mainly, how easy it is to steal or intercept data. One future solution for these problems could be an upgrade that relies on the latest advances in the science of subatomic particles: a quantum internet. Just last week, three scientists from the…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Scientists Release Result from ‘Astonishing’ Feat of Creating and Testing Quantum Gas in Space

Last year, graduate student Dennis Becker watched from a safehouse as the MAIUS-1’s sounding rocket took off from a launch facility in the Swedish Arctic. But even after repeated delays from snow and wind, he wouldn’t know for a few days whether the rocket’s payload survived. When the ambitious experiment dropped back to Earth after…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

A Visit to One of the Most Powerful Lasers on Earth

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA—The winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics didn’t just make discoveries. Their revolutionary work turned powerful lasers into ubiquitous lab tools. The day of the announcement earlier this month, I’d already planned to visit the tennis-court sized Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator, or BELLA, which uses one of the Nobel-winning methods to create…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Hey, Did You Know Stephen Hawking Thought There Is No God?

In what would be somewhat of a revelation had the late theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking not been one of the world’s most famous atheists—and spoken or written on the topic on numerous occasions—media outlets are playing up that Hawking’s final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions contains the assertion that there is…

Physics & Chemistry Tom McKay

String Theorists’ Heads Bobble Over Potential Dark Energy Wobble

Harvard physicist Cumrun Vafa is one of string theory’s strongest proponents. But this summer, other string theorists have been reeling from his latest conjecture, which might invalidate their ideas built on a decade-long assumption that dark energy is constant. Vafa’s work implies that dark energy’s value changes. A non-constant dark energy is a consequence of…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

More Than 200 Physicists Denounce Sexist Lecture at CERN

A group of 19 physicists penned a statement denouncing the talk given last week by Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia at a workshop on women in high energy physics held at CERN in Switzerland. More than 200 physicists, including Nobel Prize winner David Gross and several prominent physicist-authors, and at least 850 academics from other fields,…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

We Regret to Inform You the Large Hadron Collider Will Not Annihilate Earth

There’s a tired, much-debunked doomsday theory pushed by British physicist Martin Rees that powerful particle colliders have the potential to destroy Earth. They don’t. However, since the story has once again turned up as a top Google News hit, we will deign to debunk it once more. No. The Large Hadron Collider does not pose…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Donna Strickland, Third Woman to Ever Win Nobel Prize in Physics, Helped Make Awesome Laser Tool

Scientists Arthur Ashkin from the U.S.-based Bell Labs, Gérard Mourou from École Polytechnique in France, and Donna Strickland from the University of Waterloo in Canada shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in laser physics. Strickland is the third female physics laureate ever, after Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963, and the third…

Physics & Chemistry Ryan F. Mandelbaum

It’s Time to Plan for How Quantum Computing Could Go Wrong, Say Entrepreneurs and Physicists

Physicists Create Incredible ‘Quark Soup’ Droplets That Expand Like Little Big Bangs

Why the Large Hadron Collider Is Shutting Down for Two Years

Where Is Dark Matter? Another Experiment Fails to Find a Signal

Physicists Spot Four Black Hole Collisions, Including the Largest One Ever Recorded

Scientists Build Atomic Clocks Accurate Enough to Measure Changes in Spacetime Itself

Expanding Universe Mystery Deepens

Meet Dawn Shaughnessy, the Real-Life Alchemist Who Expanded the Periodic Table

Plans Revealed for Enormous Particle Collider in China

So What’s Going on With That ‘Hurricane of Dark Matter?’

Scientists Weighed the Earth Using Ghostly Particles From Space

Astronomers Propose Huge New Telescope System to Understand the Most Energetic Particles Ever Detected

Scientists Worldwide Are Getting Serious About Quantum Internet

Scientists Release Result from ‘Astonishing’ Feat of Creating and Testing Quantum Gas in Space

A Visit to One of the Most Powerful Lasers on Earth

Hey, Did You Know Stephen Hawking Thought There Is No God?

String Theorists’ Heads Bobble Over Potential Dark Energy Wobble

More Than 200 Physicists Denounce Sexist Lecture at CERN

We Regret to Inform You the Large Hadron Collider Will Not Annihilate Earth

Donna Strickland, Third Woman to Ever Win Nobel Prize in Physics, Helped Make Awesome Laser Tool

US Airlines Are Hiking Bag Fees Amid Iran War Oil Crisis

This Ridiculously Simple Trick Might Stop Gulls From Nabbing Your Lunch

‘Starfleet Academy’ Season 3 Could Have Done the ‘Voyager’ Sequel Episode of Robert Picardo’s Dreams

Judge Kills Lawsuit Against Infamous Study That Might Have Increased Teen Suicides

Artemis 2 Day 3: Follow the Mission With Our Live Updates 🔴

Researchers Discover How to Add Psilocybin, DMT, and Other Psychedelics to Tobacco

Fake Videos Are Already Spreading After Two US Air Force Planes Go Down Near Iran

We’re Obsessed With the Meta Fits on These New Star Wars Toys

AirPods Max 2 vs. Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen): Which ANC Headphones Win?

The Best Gadgets of March 2026

AirPods Max 2 Review: Still Ridiculously Expensive and Ridiculously Nice

DJI Osmo 360 Review: The Best 360 Camera for the DJI-Pilled

Aqara Smart Lock U400 Review: Hands-free Unlocking at Its Best

MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Review: A Solid 2-in-1 Laptop With Some Glaring Flaws

Sonos Play Review: Call It a Comeback

Sonos Era 100 SL Review: The Cheapest Way Into Wired Sonos Sound

Let us help find what you are looking for...