Why do some elements decay in minutes, while others last billions of years? Certain "magic numbers" of nuclear particles may make all the difference.

Look around you (or, if you’re sight impaired, touch something). Everything solid, liquid, or gas that you see and feel is made of matter. We sometimes call it “normal” matter, though with dark matter ...

DEEP in the heart of every atom lurk protons, tiny particles from which the chemical elements were forged, first in the searing heat of the big bang and then in the nuclear furnaces of stars. The ...

The movement of protons through electrically charged water is one of the most fundamental processes in chemistry. It is ...

A machine learning approach examines decades of data in the hunt for the proton’s charm, and the latest from the Nature Briefing. For decades, scientists have debated whether protons have ‘intrinsic ...

Protons make up most of the visible universe. Now, in a new study published in the August 18 issue of the journal Nature, scientists find that because of the strange nature of quantum physics, protons ...

In the subatomic world, nothing is simple. Take the proton, a fundamental particle found in the nucleus of every atom. For decades, students have been taught to picture the proton as a nice round ball ...

“There’s a lot of meanings for ‘small,’” says Janet Conrad, a particle physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

These force-carrying particles are the glue that binds baryonic matter together. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Gluons are ...

Bosons are particles that carry energy and forces throughout the universe. The standard model of particle physics — the most robust theory we have of the sub-atomic world — divides every particle in ...