Columnist Natalie Wolchover examines the latest developments in the “forever war” over whether string theory can describe the world.

What changes when a warp drive no longer depends on matter that physics has never actually seen? For three decades, warp-drive discussions have lived in a narrow theoretical corridor. Miguel ...

If you've read Project Hail Mary, you know it's packed with pages and pages of science. Between Rocky the alien and the ...

Meet some of the NBA’s expanding ecosystem of performance specialists — sleep scientists, mental skills coaches, linguists and other coaching consultants — who are helping players recover faster, ...

MIT researchers have spent more than a decade studying techniques that enable robots to find and manipulate hidden objects by "seeing" through obstacles. Their methods utilize surface-penetrating ...

When the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced in Stockholm in October 2013, the world was watching. Among the names read out was Prof Peter Higgs, the British theorist who, nearly half a century ...

Superconductors are among the most puzzling materials in physics. They conduct electricity with zero resistance, but only under specific conditions that researchers have struggled for decades to ...

What governs the speed at which raindrops fall, sediment settles in river estuaries, and matter is ejected during a supernova? These questions circle around one, deceitfully simple factor: the rate at ...

Physicists have long struggled to unite quantum mechanics—the theory governing tiny particles—with Einstein’s theory of ...

Physicists have discovered a surprising new “Island of Inversion” in a place no one expected: among nuclei where the number of protons equals the number of neutrons. For decades, these strange regions ...

The unofficial soundtrack of every basketball, squash or hard-court tennis match is the constant high-pitched squeak or shriek of the players' shoes. But can this squeak be designed out of them while ...

Penn State researchers used detailed numerical simulations to show that lightning‑like radiation bursts could form inside small solid blocks, under conditions achievable in the lab.Dan Perry The ...