Latest Articles
An Alternative to Dark Matter Passes Critical Test
Modified gravity theories have never been able to describe the universe’s first light. A new formulation does.
Cosmic Rays May Explain Life’s Bias for Right-Handed DNA
Cosmic rays may have given right-handed genetic helixes an evolutionary edge at the beginning of life’s history.
The Cartoon Picture of Magnets That Has Transformed Science
One hundred years after it was proposed, the Ising model is used to understand everything from magnets to brains.
Growing Anomalies at the Large Hadron Collider Raise Hopes
Collider physicists report that several measurements of particles called B mesons deviate from predictions. Alone, each oddity looks like a fluke, but their collective drift is more suggestive.
What Goes On in a Proton? Quark Math Still Conflicts With Experiments.
Two ways of approximating the ultra-complicated math that governs quark particles have recently come into conflict, leaving physicists unsure what their decades-old theory predicts.
Why Do Matter Particles Come in Threes? A Physics Titan Weighs In.
Three progressively heavier copies of each type of matter particle exist, and no one knows why. A new paper by Steven Weinberg takes a stab at explaining the pattern.
The Grand Unified Theory of Rogue Waves
Rogue waves — enigmatic giants of the sea — were thought to be caused by two different mechanisms. But a new idea that borrows from the hinterlands of probability theory has the potential to predict them all.
How Ancient Light Reveals the Universe’s Contents
A photograph of the infant cosmos reveals the precise amounts of dark matter and dark energy in the universe, leaving precious little room for argument.
Astronomers Find Black Holes Stirring Up the Biggest Galaxies
After a space telescope disintegrated, astrophysicists had little hope of understanding how supermassive black holes agitate giant galaxies. Then they invented a hack.