Quantum information science is a bit like classroom management—the larger the group, the harder it is to keep everything together.
But to build a practical quantum computer physicists will need many particles working in synchrony as quantum bits, or quibits...
Astronomers are probably just a few years from the first-ever finding of an Earth twin outside our solar system, that is, a planet roughly the size of Earth orbiting at a similarly temperate distance from a sunlike star...
Corrugations in the giant planets' rings seem to trace back to recent comet impacts, both seen and unseen, in decades past
In April 2010, amid mounting criticism that his space plan lacked direction, President Barack Obama gave a speech in Florida to lay out a few ambitious goals he had in mind for NASA.
A NASA spacecraft has captured the first-ever image of Mercury taken from orbit around the planet. MESSENGER, which on March 17 became the first space probe to orbit Mercury, the innermost world of the solar system, snapped its first photo of the diminutive, cratered planet at 5:20 A.M...
NEW YORK CITY—Who brewed—and then enjoyed—the first beer? The civilization responsible for the widely beloved beverage must have been a very old one, but we don't yet know who first brewed up a batch of beer, Christine Hastorf explained in a March 10 lecture at New York University on the archaeology of beer...
One of the troubled Fukushima Daiichi reactors contains a blend of uranium and plutonium fuel that may soon find use in the U.S. Does it pose more risks than standard uranium fuel?
His discovery that some seven-dimensional spheres look different under the lens of calculus spurred decades of research in topology
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has produced several nuclei of the antimatter counterpart to helium 4
On March 17, after a roundabout, nearly seven-year journey, NASA's MESSENGER probe became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.
Amid conflicting evacuation recommendations, radiation experts say that exposures to date have been relatively low outside the power plant and that people in the U.S. will not face any danger...
Elevated radiation levels have been detected at and around the stricken nuclear power station in Japan, but the Chernobyl accident remains far more catastrophic
Nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi station in Japan are critically endangered but have not reached full meltdown status. Our nuclear primer explains what that means and how the situation compares with past nuclear accidents...
After the Japan earthquake, seismic stations, deep-ocean buoys and tidal gauges delivered a wealth of data for accurate tsunami forecasts in Hawaii, California and the rest of the Pacific Rim, but public preparedness can be even more important...
A Parisian astronomer tells how he became the unofficial record keeper of exoplanets and when we'll stop discovering new ones
Is there a theory of everything? If so, is it possible to verify via experimentation? These and other questions energized a panel of physicists and their audience at this year's Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History...
It took space shuttle Discovery several months to get off the ground on its final mission, but the shuttle's landing came off without a hitch. Discovery touched down on schedule, just before noon March 9, putting an end to its 26 years of service, in which the orbiter made 39 trips to space and logged more than 230 million kilometers...
When Discovery touches down, it will become the first of NASA's three remaining space shuttles to enter retirement. Where will they all end up?
A launch malfunction sent the Glory satellite crashing into the ocean, almost exactly mimicking the 2009 loss of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory
A new model for the sun's inner workings may help explain the most recent solar minimum, when sunspots all but disappeared for an unusually long time
