Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News For the first time, researchers have directly observed an exotic type of radioactive decay called two-neutrino double electron capture. The decay, seen in xenon-124 atoms, happens so sparingly that it would take 18 sextillion years (18 followed by 21

Author: Al Williams / Source: Hackaday Quantum dots certainly sound as if they should be something cool, but carry the hazardous baggage of being sometimes made from cadmium which can be dangerous. What are they? In essence, they are nanometer-scale particles, so small that when high energy light

Author: Davide Castelvecchi / Source: Scientific American CERN has unveiled its bold dream to build a new accelerator nearly four times as long as its 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider—currently the world’s largest—and up to six times more powerful. The European particle physics laboratory,

Author: Nancy Shute / Source: Science News When I think of an experiment, I think of some flasks, a pipette, maybe an incubator. But to a particle physicist, an experiment can be a machine bigger than a house, designed to study subatomic particles. There’s a certain charm to the fact that such

Author: Emily Conover / Source: Science News A zippy little particle has been traced back to its cosmic stomping grounds, a flaring galaxy 4 billion light-years away, for the first time solving a cosmic whodunit. Scientists have long puzzled over the sources of high-energy particles from space,