Lithium-ion batteries

Lithium-ion batteries already power your cell phone and your laptop, and they may soon power your car. What makes these batteries so great?

Tubular Peas

Nanotubes, discovered in 1991, are a new form of carbon. With four electrons available for bonding, the carbon atom can combine with others in a number ways and produce many useful materials.

Water Tubes

Physicists have created a new form of water, one that stays liquid at hundreds of degrees C below zero.

Seeing Atoms

What does it mean to see an atom? Suppose you tried to use the world’s strongest optical microscope to see an atom. What would happen?

Natural Reactors

The first controlled nuclear reactor, built during World War II, was a great achievement, but it was not the first reactor to operate on planet Earth.

Laser Cooling and Trapping

Absolute zero, as cold as it gets, resides at the very bottom of the temperature scale.

You are My Shining Star

To a star, size matters. The more massive the star, the higher the pressure and temperature in its core, the brighter it shines, and the sooner it exhausts the hydrogen fuel supply for its fusion reactions.