Richard Feynman, a famous theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize, said that if he could pass on only one piece of scientific information to future generations, it would be that all things are ...

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan. The Facility for Rare ...

Bits of the stars are all around us, and in us, too. About half of the abundance of elements heavier than iron originates in some of the most violent explosions in the cosmos. As the universe churns ...

I love thinking about things I can’t see with just my eyes. Like the atoms that make up everything. I asked my friend Fred Gittes how to figure out the number of atoms in a leaf. He’s a physicist at ...

Orsola De Marco received funding from the Australian Research Council. She is affiliated (non-executive director of the Board) with Astronomy Australia Ltd. a not-for-profit company serving Australian ...

Primordial nucleosynthesis during the early universe generated hydrogen, helium, and minor lithium-7 before the cosmos cooled, halting further fusion. Stellar interiors synthesize elements up to iron ...

In Frank Herbert’s space opera Dune, a precious natural substance called spice melange grants people the ability to navigate vast expanses of the cosmos to build an intergalactic civilization. In real ...

Physicists have created the first-ever atomic vortex beam — a swirling tornado of atoms and molecules with mysterious properties that have yet to be understood. By sending a straight beam of helium ...

To get around the constraints of quantum physics, researchers have built a new acoustic system to study the way the minuscule atoms of condensed matter talk together. They hope to one day build an ...