Atoms are the building blocks of matter. Everything around us — from air and water, to rocks, plants and animals — as well as everything within our bodies, is made up of atoms. They are very small, ...

HEISENBERG has discussed the hypothesis that the nucleus of an atom is composed of neutrons and protons only, the neutron being regarded as a fundamental entity and not as a combination of an electron ...

The word magic is not often used in the context of science. But in the early 1930s, scientists discovered that some atomic nuclei—the center part of atoms, which make up all matter—were more stable ...

No one really knows what happens inside an atom. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. No one really knows what happens inside an atom.

An international team of physicists has developed a new technique that allows researchers to study the interactions between neutrons inside of an atom. In their paper published in the journal Nature, ...

The protons and neutrons that build the nucleus of the atom frequently pair up. Now, a new high-precision experiment has found that these particles may pick different partners depending on how packed ...

Physicists have measured the “skin” of an atom for the first time and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is extremely thin. The measurement may help us understand the properties of neutron stars. Lead-208, ...

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 ...

For three months in 2019, physicists blasted a beam of electrons at lead atoms that were held in place by foil made of diamond. The team was trying to determine the thickness of the neutron skin, the ...

The internal structure of a proton, with quarks, gluons, and quark spin shown. The nuclear force acts like a spring, with negligible force when unstretched but large, attractive forces when stretched ...

A new study identifies a transition in the strong nuclear force that illuminates the structure of a neutron star's core. Most ordinary matter is held together by an invisible subatomic glue known as ...

Since the discovery of radioactivity in the 19th century, humanity has been forced to reckon with an uncomfortable but sobering truth: much of the matter we find today will eventually decay away. This ...