Breaking research news from physics, chemistry, biology, and Earth science.
Optical cavities are pairs of light-trapping mirrors and underpin the operation of lasers, atomic clocks and many types of precision sensors.
Penn State researchers have refined an atom-scale model of how silicon carbide changes from a solid into vapor during crystal growth, work that could help manufacturers produce…
Matter starts to behave differently at extremely low temperatures, creating conditions ideal for studying quantum physics and new states of matter.
Human cells turn genetic instructions into proteins with great precision. Critical for the translation of this information are transfer RNAs, or tRNAs, small molecules that read…
A robotic truss builder that was conceived, designed and built by Caltech researchers has successfully built a structure in space—without the help of astronauts—for the first time.
An international team of researchers led by UT Southwestern Medical Center has developed a versatile light-sheet microscope that captures 3D views of biological samples, from…
Skin is remarkably good at keeping things out of the body. Typically, that's a positive.
Our oceans have effectively become trash dumps where massive quantities of plastic end up.
Technetium-99 is a long-lived radioactive byproduct of nuclear fuel production and reprocessing.
Disorder can make sense, and understanding its logic can be genuinely useful. A study by a research group at the University of Trento shows how a minimal chemical difference can…
When NASA's Voyager 2 robotic probe flew by Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s, it uncovered an anomaly: their magnetic fields are highly disordered, unlike Earth's, which has…
Levitating trains, ultra-efficient energy storage, and quantum computers: superconductivity could unlock a wealth of possibilities for the future.