Stories by John Matson

A computer simulation of how polyhedral shapes arrange into larger crystalline structures could guide the design of new materials

Unusual variations in an athlete's blood could determine guilt, even if no illegal substances are found

By now the huge Higgs news out of CERN is no longer news. The apparent discovery of the Higgs boson has been rehashed countless times in the three-plus weeks since physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva announced they had found a new particle with a strong resemblance to the long-sought Higgs.

Three billion years after the big bang most galaxies were clumpy and odd-shaped, but at least one had already assumed a familiar form, and may elucidate how modern galaxies got their shapes

The newfound moon and its kin may be remnants of an ancient smashup

The CERN collider, the most powerful atom smasher in history, appears to have fulfilled its primary quest

About 2,000 light-years away, near the constellation Cygnus, lies a fairly unremarkable star much like our own sun. Unremarkable, that is, save for the dense planetary cornucopia orbiting it.

The tools of science have changed since the golden age of physics, but many of the same questions remain

In selections from the archives of Scientific American, physicists give firsthand accounts of their groundbreaking work

Scientists have used the last moments of major experiments or spacecraft to make a push for knowledge--or to produce some fireworks

ANCHORAGE—In the menagerie of known extrasolar planets, there are hot Jupiters, super-Earths, exo-Neptunes. The terminology astronomers apply to their distant finds rests heavily on the few analogue planets in our own solar system.

Unlike gas giants (think: Jupiter), small, rocky exoplanets seem not to favor one flavor of host star

Black hole jets had previously been detected in other galaxies, but not in ours

Mercury shows new signs that it may harbor ice

The chemical fingerprints of erupted crystalline minerals are a record of activity in the bowels of the volcano before it blew

Professional astronomers and amateurs tapped their creativity to capture the first annular eclipse visible in the U.S. since 1994