What We're Reading

Recent engineering advances have enabled scientists to shrink electronics down to the cellular scale — with hopes of potentially using them to explore and manipulate the innards of individual cells.

Algorithms can pore over astrophysical data to identify underlying equations. Now, physicists like Shirley Ho of the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics and others are trying to figure out how to imbue these “machine theorists” with the ability to find deeper laws of nature.

Henri, operated by the Flatiron Institute in New York City, is now the most energy-efficient publicly ranked supercomputer in the world, besting a bevy of Frontier-style systems that otherwise dominate the top ten of the Green500.

The hypermassive star was produced by the merger of two smaller neutron stars. Normally such collisions result in neutron stars so massive that they collapse into a black hole almost instantaneously under their own gravity. But the latest observations revealed the monster star hovering in view for more than a day before it faded out of sight.

For 200 years researchers have theorized that protons hop from one water molecule to another by attaching to the nearest molecule and kicking off one of the protons already bonded there. Now a team of scientists in Beijing has imaged such particles under a microscope for the first time, helping illuminate how these jumps occur.

Thermodynamic phases governed by the strong nuclear force have been linked together using multiple theoretical tools.

Telescopes around the world are capturing photons from the blast, and researchers anticipate exciting discoveries ahead.

Telescopes around the world are capturing photons from the blast, and researchers anticipate exciting discoveries ahead.

New experiments seem to show that quarks respond more than expected to an electric field pulling on them. The result suggests that the strong force isn’t quite as strong as theory predicts.

Researchers from six U.K. universities will crunch data and build new instrumentation for the Simons Observatory, a group of telescopes that scan the heavens from a vantage point on Cerro Toco, 5,300 meters above the Atacama desert in Chile.