Rafi Letzter

An experiment buried underground in Italy has turned up a mysterious result, and a never-before-seen "axion" particle seems like the most likely explanation.

Once again, physicists have confirmed one of Albert Einstein's core ideas about gravity and relativity — this time with the help of a neutron star flashing across space.

Aerodynamic slats newly installed on the Golden Gate Bridge produce a loud hum on windy days, as San Fransiscans learned this past weekend.

Great white sharks are fierce hunters. But as juveniles, their diets involve way more bottom-feeding than hunting large prey.

Twenty-two thousand tons (20,000 metric tons) of oil products leaked from a Russian industrial power plant into an Arctic river on May 29. It could take decades for the region to recover.

Some scientists suspect Martian moons sometimes break up into rings. A new piece of evidence from the surviving moon Deimos' orbit supports that theory.

Why should a little storm in the distance shut down a Falcon 9 launch? History, the tricky timing of matching orbits, and complex meteorology.

It looks like early reports that COVID-19 first infected humans at a particular live animal market in Wuhan were wrong.

Eleven billion years ago, a hot, active, eyeball of a galaxy glared across space. It formed in a violent collision, and could help explain the Milky Way's spiral.

A new paper used an advanced "Bayesian" model to show that the emergence of intelligent life on Earth was probably a lucky break.

What if one of the strangest, most unsettling findings in particle physics turned out to be an illusion? A new study suggest a simple physical explanation for a mysterious event.

The authors of a new paper studied 4,000 tropical cyclones spanning 39 years, and showed that major hurricanes are coming more frequently as Earth cooks.

There's a microwave power experiment heading to space Saturday (May 16) aboard the Air Force's secretive X-37B spaceplane. Researchers hope it could lead to a new global power source.

A new paper gathers images of invasive Vespa hornet species worldwide, and offers clues to help identify them.

The 19.6 ton (17,800 kilogram) body of a Chinese rocket slammed into the planet's atmosphere today (May 11). It was the biggest such incident since 1991.

The Martian surface is a radiation hot zone. But ancient lava tubes might offer explorers safety from the cosmic bombardment

A polar vortex event will bring record lows and May snow to the east this weekend, even as the west coast bakes. Here's why.

A years-long Allen Institute for Brain Science project to map the entire mouse brain is complete, and you can explore it now.

A new paper by physicist Edward Witten proposes hunting Planet 9 using a fleet of laser-launched probes like Breakthrough Starshots'.

Martian meteorites found in Antarctica in the 1980s just gave up the ghosts of ancient water, rich in organic nitrogen, that existed on Mars.

Robert May, an Australian physicist, mathematician and ecologist at 84. His foundational work showed why complex systems fall apart.

Right now, key measurements of the universe's expansion are contradicting each other. A lost form of dark matter could help them agree.

There's an asymmetry between the universe's matter and antimatter. This experiment might explain why.

Underwater explorers found a 150-foot siphonophore — a stringy creature that, like coral or jellyfish, is made up of smaller critters — living in waters off the coast of Australia.

A key signal for a certain kind of dark matter failed to turn up in a search throughout the Milky Way. Now scientists are disagreeing about what that means.