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

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

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

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

Can you really create a chemical bond with one atom rather than the regular two? It sounds as though it would go against the laws of science – like a single hand clapping – but scientists think they may have found a way of doing it. The approach centres around Rydberg atoms - they contain a

Prime numbers have intrigued, baffled, and amazed us for millennia.  They’re often thought of as the building blocks of mathematics, but one of their most fascinating properties is that they appear to occur randomly – which is why mathematicians spend so long searching for the next highest prime (the last one we found was 23,249,425 digits

For the first time, scientists have performed an iconic physics experiment with a positron – the antimatter counterpart of an electron, one of the fundamental particles. Not only did they get some truly interesting results, but this achievement could become the first step towards potentially revolutionary discoveries. The experiment – an antimatter version of the

Building a bubble out of a floating drop of liquid may sound like weird sci-fi, but that’s exactly what physicists have just achieved. They manipulated sound waves to levitate a droplet in mid-air, then close it around an air pocket. Unlike the ephemeral soap bubbles you might know from your childhood, the resulting bubble was

We could be able to control matter at a whole new level of precision after scientists discovered a way of manipulating individual molecules for a millionth of a billionth of a second – an unprecedented level of fine-tuning way beyond what we’ve seen before. It was made possible with a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) and

Planck’s law of radiative heat transfer has held up well under a century of intense testing, but a new analysis has found it fails on the smallest of scales. Exactly what this means isn’t all that clear yet, but where laws fail, new discoveries can follow. Such a find wouldn’t just affect physics on an

Past experiments using CERN’s super-sized particle-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), hinted at something unexpected. A particle called a beauty meson was breaking down in ways that just weren’t line up with predictions. That means one of two things – our predictions are wrong, or the numbers are out. And a new approach makes it

For the first time, scientists have figured out how to accelerate electrons using protons passing through plasma.  That’s a big deal, because it could lead to much smaller and cheaper particle accelerators than the ones we currently rely on. Right now, if you want to install a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in your

Six years after the strange, elusive Higgs boson particle was discovered, scientists working with the world’s largest particle accelerator have finally observed its mysterious, yet most common, decaying process. Using data from the Large Hadron Collider, physicists caught the boson decaying into two smaller particles – a bottom quark and its antimatter equivalent, an antibottom

We’re still figuring out what the heck antimatter even is, but scientists are already getting ready to fiddle with it. Physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are one step closer to cooling antimatter using lasers, a milestone that could help us crack its many mysteries. They published their research on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Physicists have come up with what they claim is a mathematical model of a theoretical “time machine” – a box that can move backwards and forwards through time and space. The trick, they say, is to use the curvature of space-time in the Universe to bend time into a circle for hypothetical passengers sitting in

As you may know from scrubbing the kitchen, getting a surface well and truly clean is a real challenge – and even more so for scientists working at microscopic levels. No matter how pristine a material is engineered to be, it always ends up covered in a thin layer of molecules. Now new research has

Scientists are usually a rather cheery bunch. But every now and then, they have a habit of wondering how the Universe might cave in and destroy us in the blink of an eye. Take physicists Frans Pretorius from Princeton University and William East from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, for instance. They’ve

For around a century it’s been thought that particles don’t have defined properties until we nail them down with a measurement. That kind of quantum madness opens up a whole world of counter-intuitive paradoxes. Take this one, for example – it’s possible for a single particle to experience two sequences of events at the same

What if we have quantum entanglement’s ‘spooky’ nature all wrong, and we’re missing something? A new experiment using the wavelength of photons created more than 7.8 billion years ago makes that more unlikely than ever. If there’s a classical physics explanation for the phenomenon, it’s extremely well hidden. MIT physicists have pushed the limits on

How much pressure does light exert on the matter with which it interacts? It’s a problem that’s confounded scientists for nearly 150 years – and it may now have a solution. A team of researchers have come up with a method for measuring the effect a photon has on matter. Even though a photon has

The puzzle of how Einstein’s equivalence principle plays out in the quantum realm has vexed physicists for decades. Now two researchers may have finally figured out the key that will allow us to solve this mystery. Einstein’s physical theories have held up under pretty much every classical physics test thrown at them. But when you

If you’ve ever snapped a bundle of dry spaghetti before putting it in the pot, you know what a mess it makes. Small pieces of pasta fly off everywhere as the pieces snap into tiny bits along the middle. The way spaghetti breaks is fascinating, though. Go get a single piece of spaghetti, grasp it

The macro world as we know it is governed by Newton’s laws of motion and gravity – what goes up, must come down. But a team of physicists from Columbia University have put forward a theoretical paper that turns this idea on its head. They say there might actually be particles with negative mass –

Physics is a huge, complex field. It also happens to be one of the most fascinating, dealing with everything from black holes and wormholes to quantum teleportation and gravitational waves. But unless you have an innate knowledge of the field, it’s pretty hard to figure out how all these concepts actually fit together – and

Whenever the 15th century polymath Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t painting masterpieces or coming up with new ways to launch humans into the sky, he could often be found outdoors, quietly contemplating the eddies of water flowing downstream. What amazed the Renaissance master has since puzzled countless scientists. Half a millennium later, we’re still scratching our

Watching an explosion in super slow motion is what we expect from just about any Hollywood action blockbuster. But capturing details of an explosion that’s about the same size as a protein? That might not have the same appeal as a Michael Bay movie, but don’t let that fool you. There’s a lot we can

Using a new holographic technology, researchers have been able to twist and manipulate a beam of laser light to tie it into knots, creating complex, three-dimensional light structures. Why? To study what happens to the space around them, of course. It involves manipulating something called polarisation. To our eyes, a laser beam looks like it’s

It’s a nightmarish scenario – the elevator seals you inside, rises several floors, judders to a halt, and then SNAP! The frayed cable fails, and you plummet. Can you save yourself by jumping at the right time? In this predicament, the key point to realise is that along with the elevator, you are also falling.

The metal lanthanum strontium copper oxide might not mean much to most of us, but to physicists it just might hold the secret to developing electronics that conduct electricity with near perfect efficiency. When placed inside a powerful magnetic field, the substance doesn’t conduct quite like other metals. Once we learn why, we might at

Theoretical research by an international team of physicists has discovered that the Great Pyramid of Giza can concentrate electromagnetic energy in its internal chambers and under its base. And although the ancient Egyptian’s probably weren’t aware of this weird design quirk, the study could be important for nanoparticle research in the future. “Applications of modern

The Large Hadron Collider below Switzerland and France has just accelerated its first atoms to almost the speed of light, and the results have “exceeded predictions“. The test was an exciting proof-of-concept that could lead to a new series of groundbreaking experiments and potentially even new types of matter, such as dark matter. Usually, the

Six years ago, a group of astrophysicists came to the startling realisation that if certain assumptions about the quantum physics of black holes were true, their horizons should be ablaze with high energy particles. This “firewall” would pose a big problem, not just for suicidal space tourists, but for physics itself. It just shouldn’t be

Two of the most bizarre phenomena in quantum physics have been brought together in a single experiment for the first time – and scientists are already using the set-up to probe the very limits of reality. With the aid of two wires placed in very close proximity on a microchip, both the very weird Casimir effect

Scientists have created a tiny rotor that rotates at speeds of up to 60 billion revolutions a minute – the fastest-spinning human-made rotor in history, and 100,000 times faster than your average dental drill. The record-breaking invention not only pushes the boundaries of physics but could also be used to study some of the mysteries

Electron microscopes have been capable of taking snapshots of individual atoms for nearly half a century. But we’ve never seen anything quite on this scale. A new method for catching and measuring the spray of electron beams is giving us a whole new resolution of the sub-ångström world, opening the way to studying molecular structures

Space agencies and private companies already have advanced plans to send humans to Mars in the next few years – ultimately colonising it. And with a growing number of discoveries of Earth-like planets around nearby stars, long-distance space travel has never seemed more exciting. However, it isn’t easy for humans to survive in space for

If you’re struggling through a course in Calculus 101 in your tertiary degree right now, wishing you’d paid attention in high school, we’ve got some good news: it probably wouldn’t have helped. A study of more than 6,200 freshmen at 133 colleges and universities across the US has found you’d have been better off mastering

Physicists from Eötvös University in Budapest and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle have taken an innovative approach to determining when the first organic chemicals formed, and it turns out they could be a lot older than we imagined. Complex organic chemistry once considered unique to life might not only be ubiquitous throughout the

In June 2017, physicists achieved ‘liquid light’ at room temperature for the first time ever, making this strange form of matter more accessible than ever. This matter is both a superfluid, which has zero friction and viscosity, and a kind of Bose-Einstein condensate - sometimes described as the fifth state of matter – and it allows light to actually flow

Einstein was sure that all objects fall in the same way in a gravitational field, irrespective of their own gravity. It’s called the equivalence principle, and scientists just showed it holds firm using a distant triple-star system discovered in 2012. This system contains a closely orbiting neutron star and a white dwarf, along with a