What's up in
Physics
Latest Articles
Droplets That ‘Come to Life’
Life might have originated in droplets that behave surprisingly like living cells.
Dividing Droplets Could Explain Life’s Origin
Researchers have discovered that simple “chemically active” droplets grow to the size of cells and spontaneously divide, suggesting they might have evolved into the first living cells.
How Many Half-Lives Do You Have?
Gaining an intuition about half-life requires some unintuitive thinking.
In the Deep, a Drive to Find Dark Matter
Elena Aprile now leads the world’s most sensitive dark-matter search. But before she could build her first detector, she had to make herself out of titanium.
Grand Unification Dream Kept at Bay
Physicists have failed to find disintegrating protons, throwing into limbo the beloved theory that the forces of nature were unified at the beginning of time.
On a Hunt for a Ghost of a Particle
Janet Conrad has a plan to catch the sterile neutrino — an elusive particle, possibly glimpsed by a number of experiments, that would upend what we know about the subatomic world.
Solution: ‘Hanging Far Out Over the Edge’
A simple and elegant way to stack identical flat objects so that they project over an edge as far as possible.
Quantum Gravity’s Time Problem
The effort to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity means reconciling totally different notions of time.
The Case Against Dark Matter
A proposed theory of gravity does away with dark matter, even as new astrophysical findings challenge the need for galaxies full of the invisible mystery particles.