Atoms are the building blocks of matter. Everything around us — from air and water, to rocks, plants and animals — as well as everything within our bodies, is made up of atoms. They are very small, ...

Matter looks calm and solid, but its atoms hold immense energy locked inside tiny nuclei. That hidden reserve rarely escapes ...

No one really knows what happens inside an atom. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. No one really knows what happens inside an atom.

The word magic is not often used in the context of science. But in the early 1930s, scientists discovered that some atomic nuclei—the center part of atoms, which make up all matter—were more stable ...

In this video, we explore fundamental concepts about the atom and the forces that govern it. **CHAPTERS** 0:00 - Why is the ...

The protons and neutrons that build the nucleus of the atom frequently pair up. Now, a new high-precision experiment has found that these particles may pick different partners depending on how packed ...

Physicists have measured the “skin” of an atom for the first time and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is extremely thin. The measurement may help us understand the properties of neutron stars. Lead-208, ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

For three months in 2019, physicists blasted a beam of electrons at lead atoms that were held in place by foil made of diamond. The team was trying to determine the thickness of the neutron skin, the ...

The internal structure of a proton, with quarks, gluons, and quark spin shown. The nuclear force acts like a spring, with negligible force when unstretched but large, attractive forces when stretched ...

By firing a proton beam at carbon-12, researchers created an eta prime meson that briefly bound to a carbon-11 nucleus, ...

A new study identifies a transition in the strong nuclear force that illuminates the structure of a neutron star's core. Most ordinary matter is held together by an invisible subatomic glue known as ...