Cosmic ray telescope launches from Antarctica

Cosmic ray telescope launches from Antarctica

Washington University in St. Louis announced that its SuperTIGER (Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder) instrument, which studies the origin of cosmic rays, successfully launched today from Williams Field at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
What a deep dive into the deep blue sea is teaching us

What a deep dive into the deep blue sea is teaching us

Slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates under the ocean drag about three times more water down into the deep Earth than previously estimated, according to a first-of-its-kind seismic study that spans the Mariana Trench. The work has important implications for the global water cycle, according to Douglas A. Wiens in Arts & Sciences.
Flavor of the moment

Flavor of the moment

In a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, Bhupal Dev, assistant professor of Physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, describes how future accelerators could crash together charged particles in a new way to shed light on their behavior.
Is nature fundamentally weird?

Is nature fundamentally weird?

Unlike everyday objects, quantum particles can be linked over long distances, behaving as one integrated whole, even though they are so widely separated they can’t communicate, even at the speed of light. Einstein hated the idea, which he called “spooky action at a distance.” Physicist Mark Alford explains the logic behind a famous experiment designed […]
Why is gravity so weak?

Why is gravity so weak?

Scientists find gravity very puzzling. For one thing, they don’t understand why it is so weak; that is, why it takes so much stuff (like a planet’s worth) to generate much gravitational force. Perhaps, they say, it is leaking out of our universe. Physicist Adam Archibald, MA ’14, explains how this could be and describes an […]
When Pulsars Hit The Spin Cycle

When Pulsars Hit The Spin Cycle

Pulsars are dead stars that emit intense beams of radio waves that sweep through space with the regularity of a clock. That’s strange enough but what’s even stranger, they sometimes speed up — in a universe where the norm is for everything to slow down. What could possibly give them the extra energy? S Kumar Mallavarapu, […]
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