Physics & Math / Elements

Forget Lightning. How Do We Catch Sunshine in a Bottle?

Renewable power is inspiring clever new ways to store electricity—and to uncork it exactly when and where it is needed. 06.17.2009

New Tech Could Make Nuclear the Best Weapon Against Climate Change

Two new designs aim to make nuclear reactors safer and vastly more efficient. 06.08.2009

10 Obscure Elements That Are More Important Than You'd Think

You know hydrogen and oxygen, helium and carbon. But the periodic table's frequently forgotten residents, rare elements with funny names, show up in many unexpected places. 05.20.2009

Countdown to Fusion: National Ignition Facility in Pictures

Researchers at Livermore National Lab expect to be producing energy with a controlled, self-sustaining fusion reaction within three years. 04.14.2009

#21: Plants Inspire a Better Way to Store Solar Energy

Using the principles of photosynthesis, scientists create more efficient storage for solar power. 12.18.2008

Programmable Matter Moves From Sci-Fi to Sci-Real

Quantum dots can change the very properties of matter by controlling electrons. 10.09.2008

Nevermind The Black Hole Hoopla: Here's How the LHC Could Blow Up the World (of Physics)

The collider might find extra dimensions, dark matter, some unknown unknown, and—just maybe—nothing at all. 09.10.2008

An Essential, Concise History of the LHC, 2002–2008

DISCOVER's been all over the Large Hadron Collider since it was just a big hole in the ground. 09.10.2008

Visual Science: The Laser to End All Lasers

Scientists are completing the world's largest laser—but will it work? 06.25.2008

Stupid Science Word of the Month: Bi-George

Pressed for time, a chemist goes for a name he knows. 05.27.2008

Did Life Evolve in Ice?

Funky properties of frozen water may have made life possible. 02.01.2008

The Developmentally Disabled Galaxy

A strange old galaxy churns out new stars like a young'un. 01.15.2008

Raw Data: Inside The Oldest Known Star

Astronomers find a star almost as old as the big bang. 07.30.2007

Microscopy Approaches Fundamental Limits

If God can’t pin down tiny atoms, what hope do mere mortals have? 06.13.2007

Everything Emits Radiation—Even You

The millirems pour in from bananas, bomb tests, the air, bedmates... 06.04.2007

End of the Plutonium Age

The American Century was built on a toxic metal, one we still know very little about 11.22.2005

Materials

We may finally be smart enough to build a new world, atom by atom 10.24.2005

X

06.05.2005

Super-atoms

04.28.2005

Atto Boy!

06.27.2004

To Catch a Comet

In January a clever probe will meet up with a flying rock that may hold the secret to life on Earth 10.28.2003

The Quantum Mirage

05.01.2003

More Magnets, Please

Only metals can become magnetic, right? Introducing buckyballs that may undo our thinking on yet another scientific principle 12.01.2002

Nuclear Planet

Is there a five-mile-wide ball of hellaciously hot uranium seething at the center of the Earth? 08.01.2002

Follow Up:

02.01.2002

Chemistry

Year In Science 01.13.2002

Dream Weaver

01.01.2001

The Nuts and Bolts of Qubits, Part 2

The Nuts and Bolts of Qubits, Part 2 01.01.1999

The Nuts and Bolts of Qubits, Part 1

(If You Really Must Know) 01.01.1999

The Great Quantum Number Cruncher

If someone succeeds in building a quantum computer--and the odds of that look better every day--the information age may never be the same. 01.01.1999

Physics Watch: Fusion's Future?

Will tomorrow's power plants run on a few ounces of hydrogen and boron instead of several hundred tons of coal? Physicist Hendrik Monkhorst is betting on it. 05.01.1998

The Year in Science: Physics 1997

Cluster Bombs 01.01.1998

The Year in Science: Chemistry 1997

What's in a Name? 01.01.1998

Beams of Stuff

To get closer to the true, quantum nature of matter, physicist David Pritchard has been splitting atoms down the middle, fiddling with the halves, and then putting them back together. In principle, he says, he could do the same to a bacterium. Or even a baby grand. 12.01.1997

Interfering Atoms

01.01.1996

Atom Smith

Dick Siegel has invented a forge that manipulates matter a molecule at a time. 12.01.1995

The Philosopher's Atom

Physicists have long struggled to see the quantum mechanical atom in real-world terms. Now one odd atom is giving them a glimpse--not quite of the phantasmal quantum world, perhaps, but at least of the boundary between the world and the one we inhabit. 11.01.1995

A Small Problem of Propulsion

It's a long way to alpha centauri, but some think antimatter could send us there in record time. 10.01.1995

The Sensitive Touch

A microscope that can feel inside a molecule and label each and every atom: researchers are designing one right now. 10.01.1995

Cages of Carbon

09.01.1993

Wet, Wild, and Weird

Computer simulations reveal the molecular choreography behind the often bizarre behavior of H2O--nature's hardest liquid. 10.01.1992