The CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have observed an unforeseen feature in the behaviour of top ...

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a major new scientific facility jointly funded by the US National Science Foundation ...

The Standard Model is a kind of periodic table of the elements for particle physics. But instead of listing the chemical elements, it lists the fundamental particles that make up the atoms that make ...

The hidden neutrino As we experimentally observe them now, neutrinos cannot interact with the Higgs field because they’re are missing something vital: They are not right-handed. Particles can be ...

Yesterday, at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference taking place in La Thuile, Italy, the LHCb collaboration at CERN reported a new milestone in our understanding of the subtle yet profound ...

The Standard Model of particle physics is both fantastically successful and glaringly incomplete. Its predictions have pieced together many of the known features of the universe and guided physicists ...

2. Gravity and weight are not the same thing. Astronauts on the space station float, and sometimes we lazily say they are in zero gravity. But that’s not true. The force of gravity on an astronaut is ...

Solving the next neutrino mystery In the 1960s, a new mystery involving the neutrino began—this time in a gold mine in South Dakota. Ray Davis, a nuclear chemist at the DOE’s Brookhaven National ...

If the only thing amateur car builders needed was a ride to work, they wouldn’t ever build cars. While it’s certainly nice to take the finished product around the block to show the neighbors, there’s ...

The particles we meet The radioactivity born inside your body is only a fraction of the radiation you naturally (and harmlessly) come in contact with on an everyday basis. The average American ...

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 ...

Sorry—not a cosmic ray. When you see short, fat tracks, you’re seeing an atmospheric radon atom spitting out an alpha particle (a clump of two protons and two neutrons). Radon is a naturally occurring ...