"By the end of the 19th century, physicists had achieved an almost complete picture of the world comprised of two basic entities, particles and fields. The particles, such as the electron, behaved like tiny bits of matter; and the fields, such as electricity, gravity and magnetism, were spread out over vast regions and when disturbed could vibrate and travel as waves. The particles were the source of fields and were also moved by fields. The charged electron, for instance, produces an electric field which will in..."

"As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, representing the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important -- a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet. "This place is a supernova", says Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey’s border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: ..."

"Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? Intriguing new evidence of life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space have been revealed in the New Journal of Physics. The findings hint at the possibility that life beyond earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks. They also point to a possible new explanation for the origin of life on earth...."

"Mysteriously, four spacecraft that flew past the Earth have each displayed unexpected anomalies in their motions. These newfound enigmas join the so-called "Pioneer anomaly" as hints that unexplained forces may appear to act on spacecraft. A decade ago, after rigorous analyses, anomalies were seen with the identical Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft as they hurtled out of the solar system. Both seemed to experience a tiny but unexplained constant acceleration toward the sun...."

"U.S. researchers said on Tuesday they have made the darkest material on Earth, a substance so black it absorbs more than 99.9 percent of light. Made from tiny tubes of carbon standing on end, this material is almost 30 times darker than a carbon substance used by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology as the current benchmark of blackness. And the material is close to the long-sought ideal black, which could absorb all colors of light and reflect none. "All the light that goes in is basi..."

"Some celestial bodies are so cold that methane freezes; others are so hot that nuclear reactions occur. And then there's Earth, with a benign temperature hovering in the narrow range between freezing and boiling, allowing the existence of liquid water—and life. "There's no question that there are many things about the [universe] which if they were very much different, even just a little bit different, life couldn't exist, intelligent life couldn't exist," said Stanford physics Professor Leonard Susskind, who is ..."

"University physicist Georgi Dvali concludes that the cosmic acceleration of the universe may be caused by the modification of standard laws of gravity at very large distances, and not by "dark energy," as posited by many in the field. This modification, Dvali argues, could be triggered by extra space dimensions to which gravity "leaks" over cosmic distances. Dvali's presentation took place at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C...."