Literature

“When I first saw it I didn’t believe it,” Dr. Esra Bulbul told Decoded Science. “We could not explain the data with anything we thought.” She and her associates report a mysterious X-ray emission in the Perseus galaxy cluster — raising the “intriguing possibility” it may be photons from the decay of dark matter . . .

Physicists at Imperial College London announced a breakthrough experiment to turn light into matter in the most direct way possible. Should the experiment work, it would verify an eighty year old theory, and replicate conditions thought to exist when the universe was less than one second old.

It’s all over the internet. It’s reported in science magazines. It’s even in the New York Times. But is it real? Could a future spacecraft with “warp drive” really travel faster than the speed of light? Decoded Science talked to Sonny White,  NASA’s head of advanced propulsion projects, to find out . . .

Always wanted to take a trip to space? Monday’s powered flight of entrepreneur Richard Branson’s SpaceShipTwo takes us one step closer to a future where civilian space travel is as common as hopping on an airplane is today. Branson’s Virgin Galactic offers tickets to ride on 6-passenger SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space…

At the March 14, 2013 Rencontres de Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, CERN physicists confirmed the new fundamental particle discovered in the Large Hadron Collider is a Higgs boson. Ever cautious, CERN labeled the findings “preliminary new results.” The existence of still heavier Higgs  bosons…

Selecting the top story in physics is difficult most years, but for 2012 there is no contest. The discovery of a “Higgs-like” particle at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is the clear winner. It is number one on most everyone’s list and arguably the greatest scientific discovery in the 21st century to date

A Decoded Science reader asked the question: When I burn a log in the fireplace, am I converting mass to energy? Some say that only chemical bonds are being broken, but so what? E=mc2, doesn’t it? A common misconception is that Einstein’s famous equation applies only to nuclear processes such a…

Ninety years ago, Russian matematician Alexander Friedmann raised the possibility of an expanding universe. He showed that our cosmos could have begun in a singularity — just what our current big bang theory predicts. Who was this man and…

It’s on the radio. It’s in the news. On July 4, 2012, the long awaited CERN announcement declared a new particle has been found. But is it the Higgs boson — the fundamental particle which gives other particles their mass? CERN physicists say they need more analysis to be sure…