This new propulsion system could rewrite the rules of spaceflight—not to mention completely defy conventional physics.

A dead satellite can become a high-speed hazard in an orbit that is already packed with working spacecraft. That risk is why ...

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 ...

Check this out. It looks like a magic wand that makes things float, but it's just plain physics. I guess that's what makes these kinds of toys so cool. They do things that go against our everyday ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter ...

An international research team led by the University of Vienna has succeeded in developing a new method to directly measure partial charges in molecules. The results, now published in Nature, provide ...

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.

A new electrostatic de-icing technique that exploits the natural charge separations in growing frost crystals has been developed by Jonathan Boreyko and colleagues at Virginia Tech in the US. The team ...

Illustration of the mechanisms at play during membrane curvature sensing of disordered proteins. Credit: Zeno et al, JACS 2019 doi:10.1021/jacs.9b03927 Curved lipid ...

"...a personal field ... as portrayed in many science fiction movies and comic books, that is invisible to the naked eye—that will take some doing." Reading time 5 ...