Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world’s ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away. “The environment around this quasar is very unique …
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What is the Higgs boson and why does it matter? (in simple terms) If you remember basic chemistry, the atom is made up a proton, neutron, and electron. Those were the basic building blocks of life when I was a kid. I remember illustrations showing the neutron and proton in the center with the electron …
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Richard Feynman — Nobel-winning physics icon, curiosity champion, graphic novel hero, bongo drummer, wager-maker, no ordinary genius — would have been 94 today (May 11). To celebrate, here is one of Feynman’s most beloved classics, a 1964 lecture in which he distills with equal parts wit and wisdom the essence of the scientific method: keep …
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Pulled from Quora, here is one of the best, and most popular, answers to a question. Written by Mark Eichenlaub, a graduate student in physics. How close does an object have to be to earth to be pulled by gravity? This question doesn’t have a direct answer because, for lack of a less-direct way of …
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In 1922, the Royal Swedish Academy awarded Albert Einstein the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. The official announcement came when Einstein was on a lecture tour in Japan. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was, at that time, still controversial and members of the Swedish Academy avoided the issue by granting him the prize for his …
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It’s fun to watch the birds and pigs bounce around the International Space Station, plus check out the really cool game footage at the very end.