If you can’t find dark matter, look first for a dark force.While cosmologists may be fascinated by what dark matter does, particle physicists are fascinated by what dark matter is.…

The prototype device is a “glimpse toward the future,” the researchers write.Photograph by Elizaveta Galitckaia / ShutterstockThe other day I stepped into my apartment elevator…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.String theorists elide a paradox about black holes by extinguishing the walls of fire feared to surround them.NASADespite…

In The Zoomable Universe, Scharf puts the notion of scale—in biology and physics—center-stage. “The start of your journey through this book and through all known scales of reality…

“How many kingdoms know us not!”—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (1670) One summer’s day in 1950, the great Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi was having lunch with the physicists…

The $10,000 First Prize will include the opportunity to publish the winning article in Nautilus, a leading online and print magazine that blends science, culture, and philosophy.The…

Despite having a standard model of an AGN—a supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disk with jets streaming out in opposite directions, all encompassed by a dusty torus—making…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.If and when physicists are able to pin down the metal content of the sun, that number could upend much of what…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta’s Abstractions blog.Astronomers have found stars dating from a long-ago collision between the Milky Way and another galaxy. The crash helps…

To imagine the absence of the Arctic and Antarctica produces something like the opposite of sublime, a pang of emptiness and a longing to appreciate that terrain in person before it…