Stories by John Matson

Object Lesson: Pluto's Smallest Neighbors Prove Tough to Find

Efforts to identify faint objects in the solar system's Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto come up largely empty

A star buzzing through the outer solar system? Bring it on

A Russian astronomer turned a few heads earlier this month when he published a paper noting that a dwarf star, currently 63 light-years away, will very likely dip into the outer edge of our solar system in fewer than two million years...

LHC surpasses its own record as the world's most powerful particle accelerator

The Large Hadron Collider, the so-called big bang machine outside Geneva, has eclipsed its own world record as the highest-energy particle accelerator in history.

Room for Debate: Where, If Anywhere, Is NASA Headed?

Without a firm destination, will NASA's ambitions for a return to manned spaceflight beyond Earth orbit founder? Or, will scrapping the Constellation Program give the U.S. more options for human exploration of the moon, Mars and the asteroids?...

A look inside RHIC, Brookhaven's little big bang machine

In the high-energy physics community, all eyes have been on Europe for some time, as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, has proceeded in fits and starts to become, in 2009, the most powerful atom smasher the world has ever seen...

A Warm Jupiter: A Newfound Exoplanet Bears a Resemblance to the Solar System's Own Worlds

The COROT satellite has found a Jupiter-size world in a relatively temperate Mercury-like orbit

6 Fun Facts about the James Webb Space Telescope [Slide Show]

The mammoth infrared observatory, scheduled to launch in 2014, will look back to the first stars in the universe

A New Spin on Conductivity: Electric Signals Can Propagate through an Insulator

Electrons not only have charge, they also have spin--and electric insulators are not opaque to the latter property

Keeping math whizzes off the street--Off Wall Street, that is

Launching a successful start-up these days takes more than a good idea—in the digital age a revolutionary quantitative approach can be just as effective as a solid business plan, if not more so...

Shields Up: Magnetized Rocks Push Back Origin of Earth's Magnetic Field

Earth's churning interior produced a protective magnetic field as early as 3.45 billion years ago, closer to when life began

Not Just for Fuel Anymore: Hydrocarbons Can Superconduct, Too

Potassium atoms interspersed into crystals of the organic compound picene yields superconductivity at relatively high temperatures

More evidence piles up that the moon harbors lots of ice

Chandrayaan 1, the first moon mission launched by the Indian Space Research Organization, did not last long—in August 2009, controllers lost contact with the probe 10 months into its two-year mission...

Mars's Environment Shown to Be Hostile, but Not Untenable for Earthly Microbes

A test of bacterial survivability points to possible avenues for microbial survival on Mars, assuming life--and specifically Earth-like life--ever developed there

Unfree Spirit: NASA's Mars Rover Appears Stuck for Good

Artificial arthropod hair makes for top-notch waterproofing

Engineers continue to tinker with plastics and chemical coatings for use in products designed to stay dry (or keep their wearers dry), but nature solved the problem of water resistance a long time ago...

Wild Ride: Comet Sample May Help Constrain the Early Evolution of the Solar System

A particle from Comet Wild 2, returned to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft, appears to have led a long and migratory life

Wired Waters: Bacterial Electric Circuits Facilitate Chemistry in Marine Sediments

Biological nanowires link electrochemical processes more than a centimeter apart

Space shuttle Endeavour glides to Earth, several tons lighter

The STS-130 mission came to an uneventful close Sunday night in Florida when space shuttle Endeavour landed safely at Kennedy Space Center. The orbiter touched down at 10:20 P.M.

Kepler Spacecraft May Be Able to Spot Elusive Oort Cloud Objects

A reservoir of comets deep in the outer reaches of the solar system has so far escaped direct detection

Blast Off: Unsettled Mechanism of Supernova Detonation Gets a New Twist

Type Ia supernovae, often used to calibrate cosmological measurements, may arise from merging white dwarfs, after all