Perplexed by gravity? Don’t let it get you down. Gravity: we barely ever think about it, at least until we slip on ice or stumble on the stairs. To many ancient thinkers, gravity wasn’t even a ...

Neutrinos don’t seem to get their mass in the same way as other particles in the Standard Model. In 1998, researchers made a discovery that challenged their understanding of particle physics and ...

As technology improves, scientists discover new ways to search for theorized dark matter particles called axions. In the early 1970s, physics had a symmetry problem. According to the Standard Model, ...

In the last few decades, Argentina and Chile have proven themselves prime spots for astronomical observation—a status that has been a boon in many ways for both countries. In 2000 Ingo Allekotte sat ...

Today, more than 90% of the indexed articles in the natural sciences are published in English. That wasn’t always the case. During Michael Gordin’s childhood, his mother—who grew up speaking French ...

Every six months on the spring and autumn equinoxes, a serpent slithers down the side of the El Castillo pyramid in Chichén Itzá, Mexico. Well, it’s not a real serpent—it’s an optical illusion caused ...

For decades scientists have tried to find a way to measure the mass of the lightest matter particle known to exist. Three new approaches now have a chance to succeed. In 1980, Hamish Robertson was a ...

Three physicists share their experiences learning and communicating physics in a foreign language: English. Rose Ferreira, an astronomer and popular-science communicator who goes by the name Rose DF, ...

Matter and antimatter behave differently. Scientists hope that investigating how might someday explain why we exist. One of the great puzzles for scientists is why there is more matter than antimatter ...

A large and unexpected excess of top quark pairs has the physics community excited, but the interpretation is still up for debate. In 1995, Alexander Grohsjean cut out a story from the local German ...

Scientists worried Higgs pairs would be too rare for LHC experiments to find. But by using machine learning, they now are getting tantalizingly close. In 2011, physicist Javier Duarte and his friends ...

What are WIMPs, and what makes them such popular dark matter candidates? Invisible dark matter accounts for 85 percent of all matter in the universe, affecting the motion of galaxies, bending the path ...