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 ...

Twisting whirlpools of electrons

In Jules Verne's famous classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the iconic submarine Nautilus disappears into the Moskenstraumen, a massive whirlpool off the coast of Norway. In space, stars spiral around black holes; on Earth, ...

Geomagnetic jerks finally reproduced and explained

The Earth's magnetic field experiences unpredictable, rapid, and intense anomalies that are known as geomagnetic jerks. The mechanisms behind this phenomenon had remained a mystery until the recent discovery of a CNRS researcher. ...

What does Uranus sound like?

Sometimes kids ask really simple questions – and parents have no idea what the answers are. When one of our colleagues was asked what it sounds like on the planet Uranus, she was stumped. And so were we! So we asked an ...

Dark matter experiment finds no evidence of axions

Physicists from MIT and elsewhere have performed the first run of a new experiment to detect axions—hypothetical particles that are predicted to be among the lightest particles in the universe. If they exist, axions would ...

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