What's important to know about planet Mercury?

Close by the Sun is Mercury, a practically atmosphere-like world that has a lot of craters. Until NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft arrived there in 2008, we knew very little about the planet—only part of it had been imaged! ...

Three ways to travel at (nearly) the speed of light

One hundred years ago today, on May 29, 1919, measurements of a solar eclipse offered verification for Einstein's theory of general relativity. Even before that, Einstein had developed the theory of special relativity, which ...

Quantum scientists break aluminium 'monopoly' (Update)

A Majorana fermion, or a Majorana particle, is a fermion that is its own antiparticle. Discovering the Majorana was the first step, but utilizing it as a quantum bit (qubit) still remains a major challenge. An important step ...

Physicists discover quantum-mechanical monopoles

Researchers at Aalto University (Finland) and Amherst College have observed a point-like monopole in a quantum field itself for the first time. This discovery connects to important characteristics of the elusive monopole ...

Voyager 1 may have left the solar system

While there's no official word from NASA on this, the buzz around the blogosphere is that Voyager 1 has left the Solar System. The evidence comes from this graph, above, which shows the number of particles, mainly protons, ...

The mysterious missing magnetic monopole

You've probably heard of the Higgs boson. This elusive particle was predicted to exist long ago and helped explain why the universe works the way it does, but it took decades for us to detect.

page 1 from 40