Physics & Math / Light

What Is This... A Hi-Tech Pin Cushion?

Hint: There are a lot fewer of them now than there were a few years ago. 11.18.2009

Visual Science: Polishing a Cosmic Spyglass

A tune-up for one of the most sophisticated imaging devices ever made 11.02.2009

Visual Science: A Stimulating View

Researchers are using a new laser-like technique for looking inside of tissues. 10.23.2009

Set Your CT Scanner to "Kill" and Look Inside Some Fossils

Penetrating chunks of amber and ancient rock, powerful new imaging machines render 3-D portraits of fossil creatures concealed for millions of years. 08.26.2009

The Universe's Most Powerful Magnets

Nuclear fusion reactors, particle colliders, and other big-science rely on giant magnetic fields. But nature's most powerful magnets blow even our best efforts away. 08.21.2009

3-D Scanning: How to Put the Real World Into Your Computer

The recent imaging of two 300-million-year-old proto-spiders was just the tip of the iceberg: Here are 12 new scanning technologies that are bringing amazing 3-D images into Hollywood, medical care—and home PCs. 08.12.2009

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

Metamaterial Revolution: The New Science of Making Anything Disappear

Engineers are working with metamaterials to create super-microscopes, optical computers, and yes, invisibility cloaks. 03.10.2009

What is This? A Psychedelic Place Mat?

Actually, you'd be more likely to see this pattern in your wine glass. 01.14.2009

Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts?

Science's weirdest realm may be responsible for photosynthesis, our sense of smell, and even consciousness itself. 01.13.2009

#7: Invisibility Becomes More than Just a Fantasy

Researchers are cloaking materials from light, sound, and even matter itself. 12.21.2008

#26: Sun Catcher Promises Cheaper Solar Power

Using laser technology, scientists build a low-cost solar concentrator. 12.17.2008

#43: Next-Level Quantum Spookiness

Photons instantaneously send signals over 11 miles. Einstein remains perplexed. 12.14.2008

The 10 Most Amazing Things the Sky Can Do

Rainbows, mirages, halos, and more: Tim Herd explains the gamut of visual wonders in the book Kaleidoscope Sky. 12.04.2008

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

One Hundred Movies on Just One Disk

Holographic digital storage will let consumers store a DVD library on a single disk. 05.08.2008

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket or Are You a Size 2?

Radar peers beneath clothes to find weapons—and the perfect pair of jeans. 03.31.2008

Einstein Didn't Grok His Own Revolution

He thought black holes and quantum mechanics were too weird to be true. 03.10.2008

Teleportation? Very Possible. Next Up: Time Travel.

Some of the most far-out sci-fi is eminently do-able. 02.28.2008

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Relativity

Galileo invented it, Einstein understood it, and Eddington saw it. 02.25.2008

58. Discovery Channel 2020: Living-Cell TV

"Hyperlenses" and "superlenses" could let us watch living cells in real time. 01.17.2008

Solar Power, At Last?

The long-sought mechanism for a superior solar cell may now be at hand. 11.16.2007

Amazing Tiny Photos

The best microphotography of the year brings the very small world into very sharp focus. 10.05.2007

Microscopy Approaches Fundamental Limits

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

Einstein vs. the Nobel Prize

Why the Nobel Committee repeatedly dissed this "world-bluffing Jewish physicist" 09.28.2006

How To Make Anything Look Like a Toy

It's a small world after all that frame tilting. 07.01.2006

Sky Lights

Scientists celebrate 100 years of understanding cosmic speed limits 12.01.2005

Sky Lights

Scientists celebrate a strange universe in which space can bend and time can stop 05.01.2005

Sky Lights

Even in the darkest depths of space, there's no escaping light pollution 04.28.2005

Light Flight

01.02.2004

The Next Photography Revolution

Here comes a digital-camera chip that could change everything 12.01.2002

Future Tech

Scientists reverse the laws of optics in a quest to create the perfect lens 04.01.2002

Photography, Old & New Again

Photography, Old & New Again 02.01.2002

Physics

Year In Science 01.13.2002

Trapping Light

This is the future, and it moves at 186,000 miles per second. 04.01.2001

Sky Lights

What's that light in the western sky? Hint: It's not ET 03.01.2001

They Invented it

02.01.2001

The Year in Science: Technology 1997

Slow Light 01.01.1998

Let There Be Matter

12.01.1997

X-ray Dreams

Scientists of all stripes yearn for the incredibly powerful beacon of an X-ray laser. Charles Rhodes wants one so badly that he's willing to reinvent physics to get it. 07.01.1995