Spacecraft designers look at blueprints for a real-world version of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise.

By Mark Brown, Wired UK A group of Chinese engineers have smashed the records for quantum teleportation, by creating a pair of entangled photons over a distance of almost 100 kilometers. Quantum entanglement is the mysterious phenomenon where two particles become tightly intertwined and behave as one system — whether they are next to each [...]

Physicists have created a new gamma-ray lens and they believe it will open up a new field of gamma-ray optics for medical imaging, detecting illicit nuclear material, and getting rid of nuclear waste.

Biochemist Linden Gledhill has made a hobby of tackling tough natural subjects with do-it-yourself engineering. His latest challenge: manufacturing snowflakes in his basement.

A physicist faced with a fine for running a stop sign has proved his innocence by publishing a mathematical paper, and has even won a prize for his efforts.

There is no CG in these videos. What you see is pure, awesome science. The black liquid mixture is known as a ferrofluid, and is made up of nano-sized iron-containing particles suspended in water or an organic solvent. When a magnetic field is applied, the particles puff out, creating some alien-looking shapes and formations.

A few millionths of a second is all it takes for electrons to traverse the world’s most powerful X-ray laser, but a new time-lapse video makes the half-mile trip in 37 seconds.

How many scientific discoveries have been made by investigators carrying out studies that, in principle, should have merely reproduced known results and/or confirmed the conventional wisdom ? I do not have numbers but I suspect many. Serendipity plays …

Researchers created an interference pattern for molecules made of 100 atoms — the largest objects ever shown to reveal the weird quantum effect of particle-wave duality.

For 14 years, the website Optics Picture of the Day has collected and featured stunning examples of optical effects. We look at some of our favorites and the physics underlying them.

Researchers have proposed building a nuclear clock that would only lose a tenth of a second over the entire age of the universe, 14 billion years. The design would be 100 times more accurate than current atomic clocks.

I am occasionally asked that question by friends and acquaintances. I am referring here both to professional scientists, typically working in fields other than mine (I happen to have a lot of friends in this category, through my work), as well as to in…

We now have yet another indication that neutrinos cannot travel faster than the speed of light after all, provided by a neighbor of the OPERA detector that set off the fuss in the first place.

To achieve their extraordinary coordination, starling flocks in flight behave mathematically like magnetized metals and avalanches. Their formations don’t just transcend biology, but span multiple physical phenomena.

As most recently seen in faster-than-light neutrino measurements caused by a loose cable, science is difficult at the edge of the unknown — and neutrinos are especially tricky. More often than not, neutrino experiments have returned perplexing results, challenging scientists and helping them learn ever more about the universe’s rules.

After a 10-year search, two experiments from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois report tantalizing hints of what may be the Higgs boson. The finding bolster results announced last year from CERN’s LHC experiment, which may have spotted the elusive particle at around 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

Quantum mechanics owes its name from the hypothesis that originated it, initially proposed by Max Planck, and successively extended by Niels Bohr and others. The hypothesis of quantization can be formally expressed through Bohr-Sommerfeld conditions, w…

Scientists have produced the most precise measurement of a fundamental particle called the W boson. It will help them search for the elusive Higgs boson, the discovery of which would be an epoch-making event.

The sensational result that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light may be undone by nothing more than a simple mechanical error.

I have received a letter from a student who obtained his doctoral degree with me a few years ago, and after one postdoctoral appointment decided that their heart was really into teaching. They wrote me to let me know how things are going, and gave me p…