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This newly created X-ray laser is just unimaginably powerful. It's a billion times brighter than any previous X-ray source, and it can probe hot dense matter at nearly four million degrees. This laser could unlock the secrets of the Sun. More »
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In the 1980s, Daniel Schechtman theorized the existence of quasicrystals, bizarre materials between crystals and glasses that could never exist except in the laboratory. But now his impossible crystals have turned up in a Russian mountain. More »
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Amidst the dubious news of neutrinos potentially traveling faster than light, it's easy to lose sight of something even stranger: neutrinos are in a constant identity crisis, oscillating between different types. Why is this? In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we'll find out. More »
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The Large Hadron Collider is constantly on the hunt for "new physics" — discoveries that confound and expand our current understanding of the universe... and it may have found one in the decay patterns of a subatomic particle and its antimatter counterpart. More »
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Spin liquids are an exotic state of matter that can only exist in the world of quantum mechanics. They're a strange mess of spin states and superpositions that forces magnetism and anti-magnetism to simultaneously exist in millions of different configurations. More »
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If you're like the rest of us, you're almost certainly made of matter. But where did all that delicious, gooey matter come from? In this In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we'll find out. More »
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There's nothing in the laws of physics that actually requires matter to dominate antimatter, and yet all our observations of the universe suggest that that's the case. But some unexpected behavior by ghostly neutrino particles could solve the antimatter mystery. More »
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The Extreme Light Infrastructure is a new project that will build three incredibly powerful new lasers. Capable of creating energy pulses 20 times more powerful than anything before, these new lasers could help us probe the world of weird physics. More »
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We first created positrons, electrons' antimatter counterparts, in 1932. But it took decades to create more antiparticles. Now, the newly-discovered antihelium-4 could help us figure out whether there are vast pockets of antimatter in our universe. More »
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A seriously strange new theory says that stars may be connected through a system of stellar wormholes, linking distant pairs of stars thanks to an exotic material known only as phantom matter. Oh yes, this is going to get weird. More »
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Neutron stars are the unimaginably dense remnants of collapsed giant stars. They get their name because the conditions inside are so fierce that atoms are smashed apart into a soup of protons, electrons, and, yes, neutrons. And now we have the first direct evidence that neutron stars are forming superfluids of neutrons - a totally bizarre state of matter that can't even be created in Earth laboratories. More »
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"If nature is kind to us, we will find it next year." That's one physicist's bold prediction for when the Large Hadron Collider will detect the long-awaited Higgs Boson, the missing particle of the standard model of physics. More »
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Physics is still grappling with two basic questions about the nature of matter: why is there more matter than antimatter, and where and what is all the dark matter? Meet the hypothetical X particle, the potential answer to both questions. More »
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The search is on for the Higgs boson, and it seems likely that soon we'll find this mysterious particle that creates matter in the universe. But what if we don't? In this week's "Ask a Physicist," we'll find out. More »
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Today physicists announced that they may have found the key to explaining dark matter in the universe. It all has to do with the potential discovery of a "sterile neutrino." More »
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Immediately after the Big Bang, the earliest elementary particles fought for supremacy, with matter emerging victorious over antimatter. Exactly how that happened, though, had remained mysterious until now, as new data suggest a particular particle was key to matter's success. More »
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On today's episode of our "Ask A Physicist" series, Dr. Goldberg tackles the darker side of the universe - Dark Matter, that is. What is this curious cosmic stuff, and why should we care? More »
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Scottish scifi author Iain M. Banks has managed to carve out his own realpolitik-laced subgenre in the world of space opera. Although he writes literary novels under the "pseudonym" Iain Banks, his science fiction is literary in its own right, full of artful surprises and sentient starships with motives far more complex than anything Ian "Atonement" McEwan could ever come up with. The author of nearly a dozen scifi books, including several devoted to a civilization called The Culture, Banks is known for world-building that encompasses the vast architectures created by space-going peoples as well as the intricate social structures needed to maintain them. We caught up with Banks on e-mail, and he talked to us about his new Culture novel Matter, galactic wars, his strange sense of humor, and how everything he creates is ultimately about wanting to blow shit up. More »
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Iain M. Banks is the master of narrative zoom and pan: one minute he'll bring you in very close to a tiny moment in one person's life as she mourns the death of a brother, and the next you'll be spinning in deep space staring at a supermassive artificial world created by liquid-breathing aliens, millions of miles long, made of enormous braided tubes. Which of these minutes matters more? In Banks' new novel Matter, both do — and both are also tragicomically inconsequential. What always pleases about Banks' science fiction novels, many of which are set against the backdrop of a pan-galactic, A.I.-centric, socialist-libertarian society called The Culture, is that Banks always delivers substance and spectacle. You'll get the ethical questions, the sorrowful depictions of war, and the meditations on social evolution. But you'll also get world-shattering explosions, weird-ass aliens, and ancient technologies that are purely there to be fucking cool. More »
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To celebrate the release of Iain M. Banks' novel Matter, we've put together this handy primer for you on the Culture, the pan-galactic civilization whose members and ex-members are the subjects of so many Banks novels, including Matter. Not only do we have a rundown of every single Culture novel, but we've also got some important excerpts from an obscure essay Banks wrote in 1994 about the ideas behind the Culture universe. Get ready to enter a world where ships are sentient, humans live for half a millennium, and living on a planet is probably the most backward thing you can do. More »
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Orbit Books just announced that iTunes UK is making an unabridged audio book of Iain M. Banks' new novel Matter available a few days before its official release on Feb. 7. If you need something to listen to on your commute, this is it. Action-packed and strange, it's Iain M. Banks at his world-building and antiwar-making best. [Orbit Books] More »
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