Stories by Davide Castelvecchi

Samples from the far side of the moon gathered by China’s Chang’e 6 mission record eons of tumultuous lunar history

While many researchers celebrated this year’s chemistry and physics prizes, others were disappointed by the focus on computational methods

The Jupiter-like world Epsilon Indi Ab is one of the coldest—and closest—exoplanets that astronomers have ever seen

Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope point to an elusive intermediate-size black hole in the star cluster Omega Centauri

With the confirmation of gravitational waves less than a decade old, scientists are barreling ahead with new detectors to pick up ever more elusive ripples in spacetime

It’s a “big deal” to demonstrate entangled quantum networks outside a lab

The telescope's studies could help end a long-standing disagreement over the rate of cosmic expansion. But scientists say more measurements are needed

The Nobel Prize-winning theorist’s prediction of the Higgs boson sparked a half-century quest of discovery that reshaped physics—and our understanding of the universe

Michel Talagrand innovative work has allowed others to tackle problems involving random processes

A new generation of lab experiments is aiming to weigh neutrinos with astonishing accuracy

A feasibility study on CERN’s Future Circular Collider identifies where and how the machine could be built—but its construction is far from assured

Large language model does better than human mathematicians trying to solve combinatorics problems inspired by the card game Set

The company announces its latest huge chip—but will now focus on developing smaller chips with a fresh approach to “error correction”

Heat pumps are ubiquitous in the form of air conditioners. Scientists just invented one that avoids harmful refrigerant gases

The search for room-temperature superconductors has suffered scandalous setbacks, but physicists are optimistic about the field’s future

One of the world’s most prestigious science journals has retracted a major paper from embattled superconductivity researcher Ranga Dias

The European Space Agency says a software patch restored stability to its cosmos-mapping Euclid spacecraft — but slower operations could extend the mission

Human depletion of groundwater has shifted the global distribution of water so much that the North Pole has drifted by more than four centimeters per year

Exotic particles called nonabelions could fix quantum computers’ error problem

Luis Caffarelli’s work includes equations underpinning physical phenomena, such as melting ice and flowing liquids

Booming exploration and commercial activity could ruin the quiet, astronomy-friendly environment of the lunar far side

Researchers demonstrate for the first time that using more qubits can lower the error rate of quantum calculations

Individual atoms trapped by optical “tweezers” are emerging as a promising computational platform

A new algorithm is probably not efficient enough to crack current encryption keys—but that’s no reason for complacency, researchers say