Light traveling in a vacuum is the ultimate speed demon, moving at about 700 million miles per hour. Matter cannot exceed the speed of light - unless, perhaps, there is a speed bump in light's path…

Researchers have measured light emitted by photoluminescence from a nanodiamond levitating in free space.  Their paper describes how they used a laser to trap nanodiamonds in space, and – using…

Of the estimated 20,000 genes humans have, only a fraction are turned on at any given time. It depends on the cell's needs, which can change by the minute or hour. Determining what those genes are…

X-ray experiments have found chemical traces of the original 'dinobird' Archaeopteryx and dilute traces of plumage pigments in a 150 million-year-old fossil. Only 11 specimens of Archaeopteryx have…

My wife’s cousin, the break-dancing radiologist, broke the microphone clip off my mic stand while singing karaoke on Thanksgiving (my wife and I host Thanksgiving at our house for the family every…

Engineers from the University at Buffalo engineers have created technology that could lead to breakthroughs in solar energy, stealth technology and other areas - but they had to catch some…

Scientists have created single layers of a naturally occurring rare mineral called tungstenite, or WS2, and the resulting sheet of stacked sulfur and tungsten atoms forms a honeycomb pattern of…

In a comment on You, Andromeda, And The Largest Structure In The Universe, Mike Crow posted a picture of Andromeda, made from 40 hours of his exposure, 5 minutes at time, in his driveway. My first…

What was the backbone of early tetrapods, the earliest four-legged animals, like? High-energy X-rays and a new data extraction protocol have allowed researchers to reconstruct the backbones of the…

Synchrotron-based imaging techniques of a 50 million-year-old lizard skin have identified the presence of teeth which are invisible to visible light, demonstrating for the first time that this fossil…