“If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately,” writes the physicist Stephen Hawking in his posthumous book Brief Answers to the Big Questions. He was right. But he was also right that asking whether time travel is possible is a “very serious question” that can still

There was a huge amount of excitement when the Higgs boson was first spotted back in 2012 – a discovery that bagged the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013. The particle completed the so-called standard model, our current best theory of understanding nature at the level of particles. Now scientists at the Large Hadron Collider

Strap yourselves in, because CERN has something up its sleeve. On Thursday 1 November, Large Hadron Collider (LHC) physicists will be discussing the fact that they may have found a new and unexpected new particle. “I’d say theorists are excited and experimentalists are very sceptical,” CERN physicist Alexandre Nikitenko told The Guardian. “As a physicist

New research into a very weird type of ice known as Ice VII has revealed how it can form at speeds over 1,000 miles per hour (1,610 kilometres per hour), and how it might be able to spread across yet-to-be-explored alien worlds. This ice type was only discovered occurring naturally in March, trapped inside diamonds

A few years ago, the journal Small published a study showing how photosynthetic bacteria could absorb and release photons as the light bounced across a minuscule gap between two mirrors. Now, a retroactive look at the study’s data published in The Journal of Physics Communications suggests something more may have been going on. The bacteria

More than eight decades after they were predicted to exist, physicists have found evidence of discrete units of matter that could help us better understand the electrical equivalent of ferromagnetism. Called hysterons, these nano-scaled stacks of molecules act like independent particles in a crowd, solving a long standing mystery while laying the groundwork for advanced

On February 11th, 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) made history when they announced the first detection of gravitational waves. Originally predicted made by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity a century prior, these waves are essentially ripples in space-time that are formed by major astronomical events – such as the merger of

Scientists have experimentally confirmed the existence of strange new uranium compounds – and they predict some could even achieve superconductivity close to room temperature. Superconducting materials are able to shuttle electricity without any resistance – an incredible feat that could revolutionise our energy use. But so far researchers have only found superconductivity in a handful

In January last year, a rocket carrying a tiny chip packed with rubidium-87 atoms was launched more than 200 kilometres (124 miles) above the planet’s surface. The mission was brief, affording just six minutes of microgravity at its height. But in that time the tiny chip briefly held the record for being the coldest spot

The humble wormhole is a science fiction perennial, often depicted as looping tunnels beyond gaping whirlpools of light. In reality, nobody has much of an idea what these things might really look like – but now, we have a tantalising new prospect. A Russian physicist has come up with a way to estimate the physical

When you push the button on a laser pointer, its entire beam seems to appear instantaneously. In reality, though, the photons shoot out like water from a hose, just at a speed too fast to see. Too fast for the human eye to see, anyways. Researchers at Caltech and the University of Quebec have invented what is

We thought we’d seen the final paper from the late, great Stephen Hawking, but there’s now another – published in partnership with colleagues from Cambridge and Harvard, the paper tackles black holes, one of the topics Hawking was so passionately interested in. In particular, it examines the long-standing mystery of what happens to the information

A comparison of surveys taken of the sky years apart has revealed an empty space where a star 280 million light years away once sat. Coded FIRST J1419+3940, records of the object hint at what would have been a violent death. Curiously, no trace of its final explosive moments can be found – but this

Can the origin of life be explained with quantum mechanics? And if so, are there quantum algorithms that could encode life itself? We’re a little closer to finding out the answers to those big questions thanks to new research carried out with an IBM supercomputer. Encoding behaviours related to self-replication, mutation, interaction between individuals, and

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Donna Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page until she became a Nobel laureate, and earlier attempts to write a page for her were rejected because she was not famous enough. Strickland won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics for breakthroughs in the field of lasers on Tuesday alongside French scientist Gerard

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded Tuesday to Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their pioneering work to turn lasers into powerful tools. Ashkin, a researcher at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, invented “optical tweezers” – focused beams of light that can be used to grab particles, atoms and even living

Martin Rees, a well-respected British cosmologist, has made a pretty bold statement when it comes to particle accelerators: there’s a small, but real possibility of disaster. Particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider, shoot particles at incredibly high speeds, smash them together, and observe the fallout. These high speed collisions have helped us discover lots

The Large Hadron Collider is at it again, showing us new wonders in the world of particle physics. Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration have observed two new particles that have never been seen before – and seen evidence of a third. The two new particles, predicted by the standard quark

Humanity is producing so much data every single minute that we either need to slow down, or scientists need to crack the problem of finding better ways of storing that data ASAP. Now, new research has taken us one step closer to the ultimate in compact data storage: putting data on a single atom. As the basic

Inexpensive clean energy sounds like a pipe dream. Scientists have long thought that nuclear fusion, the type of reaction that powers stars like the Sun, could be one way to make it happen, but the reaction has been too difficult to maintain.  Now, we’re closer than ever before to making it happen — physicists from the University of