Category: Science

A hidden world beneath our feet The deepest hole humans have ever drilled barely scratches the planet’s outer skin. Everything we know about the thousands of kilometers below that comes secondhand — inferred from the way seismic waves bend, slow, speed up and scatter as they race through the planet’s interior. And according to new…

Doubling the Alphabet of Life Every living thing on Earth — from deep-sea bacteria to blue whales — writes its instructions using the same four chemical letters: A, T, G and C. Those four bases, paired off in the twisting ladder of the double helix, encode the proteins, regulatory signals and inherited traits of essentially…

For nearly a century, astronomers have known that something invisible is holding the universe together. Galaxies spin faster than their visible stars can account for. Clusters of galaxies bend light more sharply than their glowing matter should allow. The leading explanation is dark matter: a substance that makes up the bulk of the material universe…

Scientists May Have Found the First Hint of Dark Matter For almost a century, astronomers have known that something invisible is holding the universe together. Galaxies spin faster than their visible stars can explain. Clusters of galaxies bend light more strongly than their glowing gas and dust should allow. The cosmos behaves as though it…

A Faint Flash a Mile Underground Could Be the First Glimpse of Dark Matter Nearly a mile beneath the surface of the Earth, inside a chamber shielded from the constant drizzle of cosmic rays that bathes the world above, scientists say they may have recorded something extraordinary: a tiny pulse of light that could mark…

Have Scientists Glimpsed the First Dark Matter Particle? Few questions in modern physics carry as much weight as this one: what is dark matter made of? For decades, astronomers have known that something invisible holds galaxies together, bends light in ways ordinary matter cannot explain, and shaped the large-scale scaffolding of the cosmos. Yet no…

Physics has always been a discipline of imagination as much as measurement. Before a detector is built or a laser is aligned, someone has to picture the arrangement of mirrors, magnets and beams that will coax nature into revealing something new. Increasingly, that someone may be an algorithm. A new focus in Nature on designing…

Researchers say they may have taken a significant step forward in one of the most stubborn puzzles in modern physics: the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up the bulk of the material in the universe. According to a report by Reuters, scientists have described what could amount to a breakthrough…

For decades, physicists have been chasing a ghost. Dark matter — the invisible substance thought to make up the bulk of the material in the universe — has never been directly detected, yet its fingerprints appear everywhere astronomers look: in the way galaxies spin, in the way light bends around clusters of galaxies, in the…

For decades, much of the federal government’s technical decision-making has quietly depended on a layer of expertise that most Americans never see: the advisory committees, panels and working groups that translate research into policy recommendations. Now, according to reporting by NPR, a significant number of those bodies have been reduced or eliminated under the Trump…