The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Once upon a time, long ago, the world was encased in ice. That’s the tale told by sedimentary rock in the tropics, many geologists ...

The liquid levitates, and a boat floats along its bottom side. By Kenneth Chang Sail beneath a levitating sea — upside down? Through a couple of sleights of science, a team of French scientists showed ...

If you’ve ever whacked the bottom of a ketchup bottle to get that tasty tomato goop flowing, you’ve put some serious physics to work. Ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid. So are toothpaste, yogurt, ...

Unique shape: an iceberg near Elephant Island in the Southern Ocean. (Courtesy: Andrew Shiva/CC BY-SA 4.0) New experiments with ice blocks have revealed that icebergs melt faster on their sides. The ...

Physicists are fascinated with heady puzzles, from the nature of space and time to how the universe came to be. But spinning lawn sprinklers? Yes, that too. A new experiment provides an answer to a ...

Neutrinos are some of nature’s most elusive particles. One hundred trillion fly through your body every second, but each one has only a tiny chance of jostling one of your atoms, a consequence of the ...

Buried deep below the American Midwest, a new kind of observatory is taking shape that aims to watch some of the most elusive particles in the universe as they stream straight through Earth. The Deep ...

The most beautiful experiment in physics, according to a poll of Physics World readers, is the interference of single electrons in a Young’s double slit. Robert P Crease reports Simply beautiful – the ...