Photographer Chris Elkinton set off one windy December day to Cape Disappointment State Park in Washington, hoping to capture images of the rough, roiling seas and colliding waves during a “king tide.

Using sheets of light to corral waves of ultracold atoms, researchers have created an experimental platform for studying the event horizons of black holes. Making waves. Researchers have created a ...

Researchers have used radio observations of rapidly spinning neutron stars to search for signals from supermassive black hole pairs at the dawn of galaxy formation. In our lifetimes, an amazing thing ...

Two independent teams have built operating nuclear clocks—devices that might one day rival the best atomic clocks and offer new ways to probe fundamental physics. Photograph of the thorium-229-doped ...

Researchers crushed and heated ice between diamond anvils to confirm the existence of a phase of ice that could be present in the warm mantles of ice giants. In 1986, Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and ...

A ring of optical fiber can be made to host phenomena that originated in the realm of high-energy physics. Yang and his colleagues achieved their feat using a platform based on fiber ring resonators, ...

A hard and environmentally friendly plastic material is produced by subjecting cellulose crystals to humidity oscillations. That’s a wrap. A film made of cellulose nanocrystals can be molded into a ...

An analysis of a record-breaking gravitational-wave detection tests whether general relativity holds under extreme conditions. A year ago, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration recorded the clearest ...

Measurements of the decay of the Higgs boson into muon–antimuon pairs provide evidence for the mechanism by which quarks and leptons acquire their mass. Figure 1: Display of a proton–proton collision ...

The new map of the Universe’s expansion history released by the DESI Collaboration offers hints at a breakdown of the standard model of cosmology. Figure 1: A slice of DESI’s first three years of data ...

The efficiency of a quantum cryptography scheme can be improved by replacing conventional attenuated lasers with single-photon quantum-dot sources. Aerial view of the quantum key distribution ...

A high-resolution imaging system captures distant objects by shining laser light on them and detecting the reflected light. Seeing the small picture. The remote-imaging system (left) shoots eight ...