A proposed White House rule would give political appointees unprecedented control over scientific funding. One physicist, who ...

Instant travel seems impossible, but a recent breakthrough may change everything we thought we knew about the futuristic ...

The US has the most nuclear power plants in the world. However, despite this, it remains a divisive subject that people seem to either embrace or shun in equal measure. We won't go into this argument ...

Last week in Starwatch, I described how stars are born in gigantic families in part one of the trilogy of a star’s birth, ...

Last week in Skywatch, I described how stars are born in gigantic families in part one of the trilogy of a star’s birth, life ...

The central problem of philosophy, Newton wrote, seems to be that of discovering the forces of nature. Physics, however, does ...

Imagine shining a flashlight across a dark room. You can predict exactly what the light will do: travel in a straight line ...

In August of 1939, Albert Einstein sent a letter to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, advising him that the process of nuclear fission could potentially be used to create a powerful atomic ...

In 1955, one year after the United States tested a hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb used on Hiroshima, an international group of scientists warned that “H-bombs might quite ...

This media is in the public domain (free of copyright restrictions). You can copy, modify, and distribute this work without contacting the Smithsonian. For more information, visit the Smithsonian's ...

More than a century later, scientists are still proving Albert Einstein right. The famed physicist’s revolutionary general theory of relativity debuted in 1915, positing that gravity can be understood ...

Solar eclipses are a rare and brief opportunity for scientists to gather data on everything from the physics of the sun to ...