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Physics

Cool Finds

How to Improve Your Vision Without Glasses, Contacts Or Surgery

Knowing a little about the physics of light can help you focus

Not the world's fastest mite, but a related species from the same Family.

Cool Finds

This Obscure Species of Mite Is the Fastest Animal on Earth

The mite just defeated the previous record-holder, the Australian tiger beetle

Supernova remnant Puppis A.

New Research

The Big “Gravitational Wave” Finding May Have Actually Just Been Some Dust

A supernova remnant interacting with interstellar dust could have caused the signals interpreted to be gravitational waves

Noah's Ark by Edward Hicks, 1846.

New Research

Could Noah’s Ark Float? In Theory, Yes

Basic physics suggests that an ark carrying lots of animal cargo could float, but science doesn’t support other facets of the biblical tale

A view of the installation of the ATLAS portion of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Art Meets Science

Art and Science Collide in the Discovery of the Higgs Boson

Particle Fever, a documentary about the physicists who found the “God particle,” suggests doing science isn’t that different from making art

Cool Finds

Now Every School Can Access a Fancy Plasma Physics Laboratory

Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory gives remote access to a plasma physics experiment

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Cool Finds

The Science of Monday’s Big “Gravitational Wave” Thing Explained in Two Minutes

Big Bang news left you lost? This Minute Physics video might help

An artist's rendering of the Big Bang.

New Research

A New Cosmic Discovery Could Be The Closest We’ve Come to the Beginning of Time

Scientists detect the signature of gravitational waves generated in the first moments of the Big Bang

Cool Finds

Adidas May Have Finally Made a Sleek, Streamlined Soccer Ball That Players Can Live With

Professional soccer players hate when Adidas redesigns their World Cup balls. How will this new one fly?

Dr. Woosuk Bang, a Ph.D. candidate at the time of this photograph, prepares his doctoral thesis experiment on the Texas Petawatt laser. Earlier experiments with terawatt class lasers proved that clusters of gaseous molecules could be converted into ion energy. Dr. Bang's experiment, among the first to be conducted with the Texas Petawatt, created an ion plasma of sufficient temperature and density to catalyze neutron fusion reactions.

Art Meets Science

Adventures In Laser Science

A photo series by Austin-based photographer Robert Shults casts physicists and their everyday life in the lab in a sci-fi B-movie light

Bombus flavifrons worker visiting a columbine in Grant Teton National Park

Bumblebees Can Fly Into Thin Air

Once thought to be unimpressive fliers, bumblebees may be able to summit Mount Everest, new research suggests

Super Bowl

The Science of the First Cold Weather Super Bowl

Science shows that the cold weather will make it harder for players to grip the ball, avoid slipping and hear each other over the roar of the crowd

The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way.

New Research

Stephen Hawking Thinks Black Holes Don’t Exist

And he’s been trying to tell the rest of us for a decade

Northern bald ibises in a classic flying "V" formation.

Scientists Solve Mystery of Birds’ Flying V

Migrating birds flap in and out of rhythm depending on where they are in formation

I heard you like stars.

Cool Finds

Astronomers Find What May Be a Star Within a Star

The best candidate yet for an elusive Thorne-Żytkow Object

Using Nothing But Sound, These Scientists Are Making Things Float

Using nothing but high frequency ultrasound, these researchers can make anything float

Earthquake lights seen Tagish Lake, in the Yukon Territory, in 1972. Large orbs are visible in the foreground, while smaller ones (highlighted by arrows) are seen higher up.

Why Do Lights Sometimes Appear in the Sky During An Earthquake?

Scientists have a new hypothesis to explain the mysterious phenomenon—one that could allow the lights to serve as warning for an impeding quake

Tolkien’s Dwarves Would Have Needed 38 Mini-Nuclear Plants to Melt All That Gold So Quickly

Unless those dwarf furnaces were burning some sort of Middle-earth super fuel, in real life Smaug probably would have just eaten the dwarves

Can You Fry Things in Space?

Can the good old American tradition of caking foods in grease continue in the vast recesses of space?

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The Coolest Science of 2013, in GIFs

This year, we saw dissolving electronics, flying meteors, gravity-defying chains and rotting pineapples

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